You may know that I run a Formula 1 blog called vee8. It’s just one of a number of websites I am now running. It’s a lot to have on my plate and recently I have been looking at ways to save time.

Last week I asked my readers if they thought I should continue with the daily roundup of F1 links. I was bowled over by the overwhelmingly positive response. But I was still unsure about constantly using the same few sources all the time.

Websites dedicated to Formula 1 tend to be very good for day-to-day gossip and news. They have a very good feel for what is going on generally in the F1 world. But occasionally a major media company, which doesn’t necessarily churn out a great deal of F1 content, will get a big scoop. In fact, I can’t think of a quality or mid-market newspaper which doesn’t, from time to time, have interesting stories that the dedicated F1 sites have missed.

In an attempt to try and catch these stories before reading them elsewhere, but without getting overwhelmed with boring, samey or irrelevant stories, I decided to try and construct a Yahoo! Pipe. My idea was to pull in the F1 feeds from a wide variety of media websites, but filtering out stories containing words like ‘Hamilton’ or ‘Button’ so that I didn’t get overloaded with nationalistic puff-pieces.

Unfortunately, this is proving difficult. Most media websites are simply unwilling to supply me with the content I want. Honourable exceptions are guardian.co.uk (which even has a feed dedicated to Lewis Hamilton, for all your stalker needs), the Telegraph and (amazingly) the Daily Express. Other websites’ approaches towards RSS are disappointing.

Times Online doesn’t appear to have a dedicated Formula 1 or motorsport feed. It has a Sport feed. Confusingly, rugby and tennis get their own feeds. But no other sport does — not even football. The rationale behind this isn’t very clear, and having seen that two sports do have their own feeds, I feel like going on the hunt for the others. But they aren’t there. Strangely, the rugby and tennis feeds are displayed completely separately, not as a sub-category of sport.

FT.com doesn’t have any sport feeds at all. I suppose that is understandable in a sense, as the FT is due to cut back its already rather scant sports coverage. But it does mean that I will miss out on the F1 stories it does have from time to time.

The Daily Mail website lumps Formula 1 content in the ‘other sports’ section. This has its own RSS feed, but unfortunately it is shared with tennis, horse racing and, er, yet more ‘other sports’. I somehow doubt that fans of any of these sports will find this RSS feed particularly useful, unless by some fluke they are a fan of all of them.

The paper is, however, happy to cater for the niche needs of football fans. 28 separate football clubs have their own RSS feed. More creepily, the Daily Mail offers dedicated RSS feeds containing the latest news on a number of different celebrities, for the stalker in you. Quite good for stained raincoats, but not so good for anoraks like me.

These websites are surely missing a trick. It shouldn’t be a problem to provide RSS feeds for any topic, no matter how niche. WordPress certainly offers this functionality, and every category and tag has its own RSS feed. But some websites’ approaches to RSS feeds seem arbitrary at best. It seems particularly inexcusable in this increasingly long tail-aware age.

Presumably newspapers want people to read their content. But some of their websites are sticking to the old model of content delivery — chucking it all in one place and making its readers browse through everything until they come across an article they’re interested in. That was all very well when the most efficient way of disseminating news was to print it on a dead tree. But that was last the case at least ten years ago.

Now we have more efficient and cost-effective ways to get to the information we want, but newspapers seem dead set on not offering them to us. Bandwidth isn’t an excuse. guardian.co.uk not only offers RSS feeds for a huge variety of topics, it offers full RSS feeds for them. Plus, with a nifty bit of URL hacking, you can access highly specialist RSS feeds that aren’t even advertised at all.

So why are some websites still asking me to subscribe to an “other sports” feed filled with a baffling mish-mash of unrelated stories? What makes the editors of these websites think that I am going to hunt down their F1 content by spending my time trawling through their badly designed website all the time, or read through a thousand RSS items that don’t interest me?

The thing is, someone looking for niche content is probably more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed. This is specifically because they don’t want to go through the entire site’s content. Yet these websites only supply RSS feeds containing a large range of the content. For the content consumer, this doesn’t save much more time than visiting the website.

If these websites offered an RSS feed for F1, they would be guaranteed at least one reader — and then more when I link to interesting articles from vee8. As it stands, I am tearing my hair out and finding it easier not to think about these websites at all.

I said that I had hoped to tweet a bit from Scotweb2. I am terrible at multitasking though so I only managed a miserly two, hurriedly posted during lunch. So instead I will write a report of what went on.

First off there was a great talk by James Munro who works on an interesting website, Patient Opinion. The site offers people a platform to make comments — positive or negative — about their experiences of the NHS.

It’s a great website demonstrating the idea that perhaps governments should not be making websites — they should be publishing data and APIs for other people to build upon. This is very much in the Mysociety mould. You might expect this sort of website to be provided by the government. Indeed, since Patient Opinion was founded the NHS has started a similar project on its NHS Choices site. Cleverly, Patient Opinion has created a mashup of their content at the NHS’s.

But there are potential problems with such a site receiving government backing. During the presentation it was pointed out by some that on an NHS-run or government-backed website, people might be tempted to rant or let off steam. But in the more neutral arena of an independent site like Patient Opinion, people are more likely to post more thoughtful comments.

Another point about Patient Opinion is that all of the comments that appear there are pre-moderated. If I remember correctly, James Munro said that 95% of all comments are approved on Patient Opinion while only around 75% of comments are approved on NHS Choices. There might be a suspicion that the NHS may suppress negative comments. People are more likely to trust an independent website.

It struck me afterwards (long after there was the opportunity to mention it) that this phenomenon could apply not just to government websites but to all websites. I have written about the poor standard of comments on mainstream media websites a number of times in the past. I have argued that newspaper websites might be better off putting some kind of Technorati-style widget at the bottom of each article rather than appending a comment thread where the poor standard of debate can sometimes be quite off-putting.

Then there are the implications for business websites. It was noted that web 2.0 is all about transparency. Another theme of Scotweb2 was the implications / challenges / opportunities of web 2.0 for small businesses (and, indeed, large businesses). What if a business decides to have a feedback section on its website? It will face the same issues that a government website will face — users will be reluctant to trust it and may be tempted to simply let off steam.

Perhaps the concept of Patient Opinion could be applied to all kinds of different areas. It seems to me that if it works in the realm of healthcare, there is no reason why it wouldn’t make sense in other areas like the voluntary / third sector, pressure groups, the media or even business?

Following James Munro, Simon Dickson made an engaging presentation evangelising about the potential of open source solutions such as Linux, PHP and particularly WordPress. I think I had read this on Simon Dickson’s blog before, but the cost of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website still has your jaw hitting the floor. £19.2m over five years — for one website. And that was it on target. Millions sunk before a single page is made, including £1.47m on the content management system alone.

Simon Dickson’s point is that you don’t need to use proprietary systems built by the likes of Microsoft. Why spend millions on a CMS when you can use the highly flexible WordPress platform which is free? The new-ish 10 Downing Street website is run on WordPress. And the Wales Office website is also now run on WordPress, and it cost a significantly lower amount of money. I’ve forgotten exactly what it was, but it was certainly not £19.2m.

Something that came up a number of times was that the cause of many of the problems leading to inadequate or ridiculously expensive government websites is to do with mindset. WordPress is seen as a risk; Microsoft is a trusted brand. Thankfully that seems to be changing in a lot of areas.

I got the sense that a lot of people were very impressed by the idea of WordPress. If you’ve been using it for a while it is easy to take it for granted. But the fact remains that it is a remarkable achievement for a community to have created such a powerful open-source, freely available and fully tweakable application.

After Simon Dickson’s initial presentation, we split up into two groups. Already being a convert to WordPress, I opted to skip Simon Dickson’s workshop about WordPress and instead I stuck around for Stewart Kirkpatrick’s talk about content. The presentation basically highlighted interesting websites that have become successful because of the careful choice of content. For instance, YouTube beat Google Video because it gives you plenty of toys to play with (e.g. it’s dead easy to share videos on Facebook, embed them on your blog, etc) and relevant videos to tempt you further. Common sense stuff really.

I think it was at this point of the afternoon that we got talking about some startling instances of data unavailability. Apparently the Royal Mail doesn’t have a database of locations of all of its postboxes, while another person said he knew of a company that couldn’t even produce a database of its employees. if I recall correctly, James Munro mentioned the difficulty Patient Opinion had in simply getting a database of Scottish hospitals and their postcodes.

After lunch there was a talk about BT Tradespace. Then I hung around for Mark Ballard’s workshop about web 2.0 and civic society. The thing that struck me most during this discussion was the idea that some voluntary organisations are seemingly quite worried about web 2.0 efforts swiping the rug from under their feet.

All the while I had a good chit-chat with Stephen Glenn. I would have loved to have been able to join the others in the pub, but unfortunately I had to rush back home to work.

All-in-all it was a great day with many fascinating presentations. Hats off to Alex Stobart for organising the event. By the sounds of it there are going to be more events like this in the future. It would be great for the web 2.0 ball to get rolling a bit faster in Scotland.

Hello there. I misplaced my F1-blogging mojo for a bit, hence the lack of proper posts. Mind you, that may be just because Formula 1 is on its annual summer break at the moment so there’s not a lot of news going around just now.

I knew it would be like that, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to finish of the new theme for this website, which I have been working on for a couple of months. (That was the new thing that I hinted about in a previous post.) And tonight I’ve decided it’s good enough to launch it. I’ll still be tweaking bits and pieces, and one or two new features will be added over the weekend. In the meantime, any feedback would be greatly welcomed. If you spot any bugs then do please let me know.

One of the reasons I decided to opt for a new look was just so that I could get an original design up. Although the previous look, which was inspired by the classic FOM graphics used throughout the 1990s, was quaint, it was also a bit unoriginal of me. I wanted to give vee8 its own unique identity.

You will see also that in the sidebar I have built a comprehensive index. You can now choose to view posts that mention a particular driver, team or grand prix. There is also now a full A–Z index.

The new look also puts more emphasis on the author of each post. Beforehand it wasn’t terribly obvious who wrote each post. Now the author’s handle appears on a bold red background and a gavatar (or identicon) is also displayed.

Speaking of post authors…

Important notice for anyone who has submitted a post

A few months ago the good people of Brits On Pole registered here and wrote a post. And it never got published. They emailed me about it, and I didn’t have a clue what was happening. There was no sign of the rogue post anywhere. Later on they submitted a couple of other posts and the process worked fine.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered if the problem struck anyone else. So I’m writing a note here to ask if that has happened to any of you guys. 16 people have registered, but only seven of them have submitted a post — as far as I know.

I have never rejected a post for vee8, so if you submitted a post and it never appeared it wasn’t because I didn’t like what you wrote. It must simply have got lost. Please accept my apologies if your post was lost, and do feel free to write another one. But perhaps keep a backup copy yourself and email it to me in case it gets lost again.

Thanks!

Daily news update has evolved

You may have noticed recently that I’ve had a bit of trouble with the daily news update. Instead of using Delicious’s own tool for publishing a daily post, I have decided to use a plugin (Postalicious) instead.

Postalicious confused me for a while. In fact, in all honest, it still confuses me a little bit. I can’t tell exactly when it will post something, even after setting it all up the way I wanted. Hopefully in the long run it will be published daily at 1700 UK time — as long as there are three or more links for that day.

Using Twitter to liveblog the race is no more

I have decided to ditch my old habit of updating the Twitter account throughout the race. My original intention was for my tweets to act as the race report. In reality, Twitter was simply not reliable enough to work like this. I found that when the daily Twitter post was published here, huge chunks of the race were missing. In the meantime, I will be focussing all my attention on the F1 Fanatic liveblog.

I will still use Twitter to post quick comments though.

For those who haven’t put the two and two together, my dad is Jack Stephen who can sometimes be found in the comments on this site. (I can tell you, it’s strange calling my dad ‘Jack’ just so that other people can follow the conversation properly.)

Over the weekend I set up a blog for him at which he posts as his science fiction writing alter-ego, Jack Deighton. It’s called A Son of the Rock.

I did the “gold” and black masthead because I thought he would appreciate that being a fan of Dumbarton Football Club. However, coming up with a complementary colour for the links was a tough job. Despite a plethora of suggestions I received on Twitter and Facebook (thank you all), nothing looked right to me. Perhaps that’s because I just don’t like the mustard colour. In the end I settled on the blue.

The eagle-eyed among you will spot that the theme is basically the one I use for Scottish Roundup but tweaked a bit (which, in fairness, is in turn just the default WordPress theme tweaked). That was part of the problem with the blue links. If it was scrolled down and I couldn’t see the masthead it reminded me far too much of Scottish Roundup. Hopefully I’ve tweaked it enough to keep it fresh and different.

Incidentally, my dad is now the third member of the family to have started blogging. He joins me (obviously) and my brother who blogs at Onebrow along with his girlfriend Laura.

Yesterday WordPress 2.6 came out which is pretty unbelievable because it feels like WP 2.5 just came out last month. Anyway, a new version of WordPress comes with the necessity to upgrade and the hair-pulling that comes with it.

My upgrades went fairly smoothly, but I did notice an issue with .swf files not being installed. I saw that a couple of other people had the same problem.

It got me thinking about what might be causing the problem. The obvious candidate was that the Flashblock Firefox extension wasn’t playing nice with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Flashblock, incidentally, is a must-have Firefox extension for me as it allows you to have complete control over Flash files. No more stupid adverts or autoplay or any of that other nonsense that comes with Flash. Meanwhile, WordPress Automatic Upgrade is slightly flaky, but at the end of the day it makes upgrading WordPress much less painful and much faster than it would be otherwise.

Anyway, I have three blogs. I had the problem with the .swf files on the first two blogs. So that gave me a perfect opportunity to see if my theory about Flashblock was right on my third blog. So I disabled Flashblock and ran WPAU. The upgrade went well, with all the files uploading.

If you already ran WPAU while using Flashblock, your WordPress upgrade may be incomplete. Check to see if the following files are missing and upload them manually.

• wp-includes/js/swfupload/swfupload_f9.swf
• wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/media/img/flv_player.swf

I’ve emailed the author of WPAU to let him know. He says he’ll work on a fix, but I thought I’d post it here to give people a heads-up.