Video – putting up Parliament’s Christmas tree

Jackie let you know a while back of the lengths we went to in filming Parliament’s Christmas tree. You’ll be glad to know that all that effort wasn’t for naught – as although our team has been put on its knees through the usual winter bugs, we managed to put this video together. Enjoy, let us know what you think in the comments area below.

If you have a fast internet connection, you can watch the high quality version of this video.

Parliamentary News through WordPress

Last week we launched our improved news service: http://news.parliament.uk/

This new area allows our editorial team to expand the service they already provide: highlighting parliamentary business, reports, events and more.

News then, news now

Previously our news content was restricted to text on our main landing pages, with no unique URLs (web addresses) for individual stories or associated RSS feeds. Now each news story has its own URL and there is an RSS feed for all the news content.

We are applying our libraries’ taxonomy to each news story, so you can browse news by subject, ie news only about the House of Lords or Bills. This taxonomy stretches into the hundreds, so our news by subject listing will grow as our archive builds up.

RSS and email subscriptions

Each subject has its own RSS feed – we list the the RSS for some of the top level subjects – and users can make their own feed for subjects they are particularly interested in. For example, if you’re interested in the subject Economy and finance, adding ‘rss’ to the end of the URL will give you the RSS feed to subscribe to, the same with adding ‘atom’. (Here are the Wikipedia entries for RSS and Atom feeds – you may also find this video from Common Craft explaining RSS helpful). We also offer the option to subscribe to our main news categories by email.

Using WordPress

Around the office the working title for this project has been ‘WordPress News’, which should give you a clue as to what’s under the hood of the news area: WordPress.org.

WordPress is open source software that is free to use and customise. This is the first time Parliament has used the open source option. The main reasons for doing so are the ability to customise the look and functionality of WordPress easily, it’s economical, and inputting and publishing content is simple and fast. And it lets us provide RSS feeds. And unique, fairly friendly, URLs. Basically everything you’d expect from a website today.

We’re not the first organisation/institution to use WordPress in the UK, perhaps the most famous recent example is the Number 10 website, but we’re happy to be joining an expanding group.

Send us feedback

We are very interested in hearing what you think of this new area and what we can do to improve upon it. Please leave your comments below or email webmaster@parliament.uk

Birds of prey on YouTube

In our latest video on the UK Parliament YouTube channel we meet Gary Railton and his Harris Hawk, George. Gary works as a pest controller around the parliamentary estate and uses Harris Hawks to keep pigeons and sea gulls at bay.

If you have a fast internet connection, you can watch the high quality version of this video.

‘They’ say never work with animals. After doing this video I would also add ‘or strong winds and a busy courtyard in Parliament’. The strong winds meant our hawk for the day, George, couldn’t/wouldn’t fly very high, and vans and workman coming and going was a challenge for sound.

This video was put together using iMovie ‘08, which, as one of our counterparts in the Welsh Assembly said while holding back the laughter, is a ‘nice little package’ – the emphasis being on ‘little’. The visit to the Assembly was a real eye-opener in terms of where we are in our capacity to produce decent video content and where we want to be. Watch this space for news on how we improve this area of the Web Centre’s work.

Twittering State Opening 2008

Today we tried a bit of live twittering on an event – the State Opening of Parliament (read all our tweets). There were two web editors and a producer involved: writing text, checking text and shouting at the BBC coverage for not showing what we needed to know.

We prepared tweets and associated links in advance, trying to link back to our main site and Flickr and YouTube channels where we could. Inevitably we had to edit some messages down for length, change the tone, or jump in and do more off-the-cuff updates as things happened.

It would have been good to have created a microsite along the lines of Number 10’s G8 Summit site, but we didn’t really have the internal access to make it work. Maybe next year. Feedback on what we did was good overall, let us know what you thought in the comments below, or via Twitter, and whether you think it’s worthwhile doing an event microsite on State Opening or other parliamentary events like japang8.number10.gov.uk/ – or if you prefer having feeds from YouTube, Flickr, Twitter kept separate.

And a word on hashtags…

We added the hashtag #state08 to all of our tweets and invited our followers to do the same if they were commenting on, or asking us questions about State Opening.

Since Twitter acquired the search tool Summize, which has massively improved the ability to search Twitter effectively, there’s been some debate on the usefulness of hashtags, when keyword searching works well now. But we’ve found it a useful way of grouping information and responses together – I guess the essential thing is consistency with the hashtag or keyword you use and ask your followers to use. You can compare the search results and make your own mind up of which is better: using ‘state opening‘ and using ‘#state08‘.

O’ Christmas tree, O’ Christmas tree …

Web team filming the christmas tree

The web team has acquired some new kit so that we can produce our own video content for the website.   As Miranda and I are fairly new to filming the rest of the team suggested that we record the Christmas tree being put up in New Palace Yard. 

Easy task you might think, not much movement to capture, you just set up the camera and film the workmen as they put up the tree; add the decorations and switch on the lights!

On Saturday from 7.30am until 5.30pm we stood in New Palace Yard and filmed the workmen putting up the Christmas tree.  We battled the cold, the rain and a very wonky tripod – but we would not be defeated. Now if you can only bear with us we will attempt to edit said footage into a 2 minute film! It might be ready for next Christmas!

In the meantime visit our Christmas tree set on flickr – that should whet your appetite.