diff options
11 files changed, 40 insertions, 40 deletions
diff --git a/_posts/2011-07-04-asktheeu-and-informata-zyrtare-at-okcon201.markdown b/_posts/2011-07-04-asktheeu-and-informata-zyrtare-at-okcon201.markdown index 02e08de5a..89c4c0bce 100644 --- a/_posts/2011-07-04-asktheeu-and-informata-zyrtare-at-okcon201.markdown +++ b/_posts/2011-07-04-asktheeu-and-informata-zyrtare-at-okcon201.markdown @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ _AskTheEu_ will help NGOs, journalists and citizens to exercise their right to k The right to know at a European level is based around access to _documents_ rather than information. This means that all emails should be accompanied by the correct boilerplate text to ensure that they count as FOI requests. European-level software also opens up some interesting localisation issues: a request can be made in any language, but the information in the response can just be supplied in the original language. We agreed that for the initial launch we'll just invite people to use Comments to provide informal summaries in other languages, but longer term we might consider some kind of community-run translation service. -Another interesting localisation challenge will be providing user support. A successful Alaveteli site [needs plenty of resources to keep it running](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/Adminstrator%27s-manual): responding to legal requests, providing tech support, helping people to progress with difficult requests for information. _[WhatDoTheyKnow](http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/)_ usually has 3 or 4 active volunteers supporting it at any one time – and that's just in English. Providing great support in 21 or more languages will need considerable community involvement. +Another interesting localisation challenge will be providing user support. A successful Alaveteli site [needs plenty of resources to keep it running](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/Adminstrator%27s-manual): responding to legal requests, providing tech support, helping people to progress with difficult requests for information. _[WhatDoTheyKnow](http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/)_ usually has 3 or 4 active volunteers supporting it at any one time – and that's just in English. Providing great support in 21 or more languages will need considerable community involvement. _Informata Zyrtare_ will launch in three languages: Albanian, Serbian and English. As the majority of requests are expected to be in Albanian, and there are plenty of bilingual speakers available, support is less likely to be an issue. The team from FLOSSK has been busy working on internationalising the Alaveteli templates and already has a working prototype site in three languages. diff --git a/_posts/2011-07-13-forks-and-themes.markdown b/_posts/2011-07-13-forks-and-themes.markdown index d5d4e2d86..0edc0207e 100644 --- a/_posts/2011-07-13-forks-and-themes.markdown +++ b/_posts/2011-07-13-forks-and-themes.markdown @@ -24,4 +24,4 @@ _Merging_ is the process of taking someone else's changes and mixing them with This is now complete, which means we can once again start to benefit from each others' work. -As a side effect, I needed to come up with ways to keep customisations separate from the core code. All such customisations should now live in "themes", which I have [started to document](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/THEMES.md). One such theme is the Informata Zyrtare theme, which is now on Github, should anyone want to experiment with it. +As a side effect, I needed to come up with ways to keep customisations separate from the core code. All such customisations should now live in "themes", which I have [started to document](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/THEMES.md). One such theme is the Informata Zyrtare theme, which is now on Github, should anyone want to experiment with it. diff --git a/_posts/2011-07-13-pret-a-porter-alaveteli.markdown b/_posts/2011-07-13-pret-a-porter-alaveteli.markdown index f0e1f81a7..cff884d1a 100644 --- a/_posts/2011-07-13-pret-a-porter-alaveteli.markdown +++ b/_posts/2011-07-13-pret-a-porter-alaveteli.markdown @@ -22,4 +22,4 @@ As a nice side-effect, it means I can run the automated tests really quickly by People thinking of trying out Alaveteli should therefore consider using the AMI to get started quickly; not least because new AWS customers have access to a "[free tier](http://aws.amazon.com/free/)" for a year. -The only down side is that actually getting started with EC2 can be a bit fiddly if you've never done it before. [Read more about the AMI on the Alaveteli wiki](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/Alaveteli-ec2-ami). +The only down side is that actually getting started with EC2 can be a bit fiddly if you've never done it before. [Read more about the AMI on the Alaveteli wiki](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/Alaveteli-ec2-ami). diff --git a/_posts/2011-07-27-speeding-things-up-with-varnish.markdown b/_posts/2011-07-27-speeding-things-up-with-varnish.markdown index f23e37934..3558db2e7 100644 --- a/_posts/2011-07-27-speeding-things-up-with-varnish.markdown +++ b/_posts/2011-07-27-speeding-things-up-with-varnish.markdown @@ -14,27 +14,27 @@ On [WhatDoTheyKnow](http://www.whatdotheyknow.com), the Alaveteli software has l - + * Rails and ruby (especially ruby 1.8, which we're currently running) being relatively slow in general - + * The size of our database (two tables in particular were taking up more than 40GB space). In particular this meant our backups were hogging I/O. - + * Our heavy use of Xapian, on the same machine as the large database: lots of disk seeks, particularly during costly batch walk-and-retrieve operations (e.g. sending out email alerts) - + * Some areas where the database could be better optimised - + * The fact that Varnish wasn't actually caching many of our pages, as they didn't have any relevant cache headers set up (in fact, the Rails default is for them to have `Cache-control: private` headers. Really, I should have done some baseline performance tests, incrementally introduced improvements, and re-profiled the site with each improvement. However, I've got loads of other things to do, and there are data protection issues with grabbing a copy of the entire current WhatDoTheyKnow database, so in consultation with some other team members, I just picked some of the lowest-hanging fruit. -The detail of the discussion and outcomes are [recorded in the issue tracker](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/issues/86), but it turns out that the biggest, most immediate effect was to simply reduce the number of requests that made it to the Rails application in the first place -- as is so often the case in applications like this. +The detail of the discussion and outcomes are [recorded in the issue tracker](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/86), but it turns out that the biggest, most immediate effect was to simply reduce the number of requests that made it to the Rails application in the first place -- as is so often the case in applications like this. -The moral: on all but the smallest Alaveteli website, deploy it behind a caching proxy like [Varnish](https://www.varnish-cache.org/). I'll write up some notes in the documentation in due course [edit: [a sample varnish configuration](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/master/config/varnish-alaveteli.vcl) is now supplied with the software). +The moral: on all but the smallest Alaveteli website, deploy it behind a caching proxy like [Varnish](https://www.varnish-cache.org/). I'll write up some notes in the documentation in due course [edit: [a sample varnish configuration](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/master/config/varnish-alaveteli.vcl) is now supplied with the software). You can see the difference on the resource usage of the server running WhatDoTheyKnow on this chart -- I deployed the caching-related changes around 08:15 on these charts: diff --git a/_posts/2011-07-29-you-need-volunteers-to-make-your-website-work.markdown b/_posts/2011-07-29-you-need-volunteers-to-make-your-website-work.markdown index af7f93619..2bf77195a 100644 --- a/_posts/2011-07-29-you-need-volunteers-to-make-your-website-work.markdown +++ b/_posts/2011-07-29-you-need-volunteers-to-make-your-website-work.markdown @@ -10,20 +10,20 @@ categories: - Uncategorised --- -A successful Alaveteli website is nothing without its volunteers. These are people who care so much about transparency and the right to know that they are motivated to help run a busy website. There's [some detail on the wiki](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/Adminstrator%27s-manual), but in short, volunteers do things like: +A successful Alaveteli website is nothing without its volunteers. These are people who care so much about transparency and the right to know that they are motivated to help run a busy website. There's [some detail on the wiki](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/Adminstrator%27s-manual), but in short, volunteers do things like: + - * Provide user support to people who need help using the website - + * Provide advice on FOI laws when users encounter difficult authorities or situations - + * Act on takedown or redaction requests in response to legally or ethically reasonable requests from users or authorities - + * Investigate and report on bugs in the software diff --git a/_posts/2011-09-20-how-to-get-started-with-an-alaveteli-site.markdown b/_posts/2011-09-20-how-to-get-started-with-an-alaveteli-site.markdown index eec2cb116..f8f7a0cfa 100644 --- a/_posts/2011-09-20-how-to-get-started-with-an-alaveteli-site.markdown +++ b/_posts/2011-09-20-how-to-get-started-with-an-alaveteli-site.markdown @@ -11,4 +11,4 @@ categories: - Partners --- -Just a quick blog post to note that there's now a rudimentary [Getting Started](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/Getting-started) guide, which is recommended reading for anyone thinking of starting their own Alaveteli website. +Just a quick blog post to note that there's now a rudimentary [Getting Started](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/Getting-started) guide, which is recommended reading for anyone thinking of starting their own Alaveteli website. diff --git a/_posts/2011-10-15-a-general-update.markdown b/_posts/2011-10-15-a-general-update.markdown index 6f4f97ca6..ac0b219d3 100644 --- a/_posts/2011-10-15-a-general-update.markdown +++ b/_posts/2011-10-15-a-general-update.markdown @@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ categories: As I'm about to go on paternity leave, I thought it would be a good time to summarise what's been happening the last few months. -The Alaveteli software is starting to look in reasonable shape. We have a lovely new theme designed by Nick Mason of [thetuttroom.com](http://www.thetuttroom.com), which can be seen on the new test server set up at [http://test.alaveteli.org](http://test.alaveteli.org). It no longer takes a day or more to install the software; we have some way to go to achieve a 5-minute install, but the[ documentation is better](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/INSTALL.md), and it's [now possible to run a development version on Mac OS X](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/OS-X-Quickstart). +The Alaveteli software is starting to look in reasonable shape. We have a lovely new theme designed by Nick Mason of [thetuttroom.com](http://www.thetuttroom.com), which can be seen on the new test server set up at [http://test.alaveteli.org](http://test.alaveteli.org). It no longer takes a day or more to install the software; we have some way to go to achieve a 5-minute install, but the[ documentation is better](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/INSTALL.md), and it's [now possible to run a development version on Mac OS X](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/OS-X-Quickstart). There have been lots of small improvements to the user interface, such as the beginnings of a [user-friendly advanced search](http://test.alaveteli.org/en/search), and a better way for the user to decide who followup messages should go to. In the backend, moderators' lives are getting a bit easier now that user alert bounces are handled automatically. There's also now some spam protection in the form of reCaptchas (only for users coming from abroad). Finally, the software performs around 30% faster on [WhatDoTheyKnow](http://www.whatdotheyknow.com), thanks to new caching settings and a better backend storage system for emails. @@ -20,6 +20,6 @@ On the development front, we have adopted the [git flow model](http://nvie.com/p Beyond the software itself, the most exciting news is that there are now two more Alaveteli websites launched: [AskTheEU](http://www.asktheeu.org) and [InformataZyrtare](http://informatazyrtare.org) (Kosovo). The sites look great, and the first requests are starting to come in. -Over the next few months, we hope to continue to support groups in other countries who are hoping to launch Alaveteli websites. We also hope to learn from the recent new launches to make it easier to customise and deploy Alaveteli. If you're thinking about using Alaveteli, please have a read of our new [Getting Started guide](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/Getting-started), and get in touch! +Over the next few months, we hope to continue to support groups in other countries who are hoping to launch Alaveteli websites. We also hope to learn from the recent new launches to make it easier to customise and deploy Alaveteli. If you're thinking about using Alaveteli, please have a read of our new [Getting Started guide](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/Getting-started), and get in touch! diff --git a/_posts/2012-04-16-alavetelicon-community-cakes-and-black-boxes.markdown b/_posts/2012-04-16-alavetelicon-community-cakes-and-black-boxes.markdown index b117adcce..7e0372e41 100644 --- a/_posts/2012-04-16-alavetelicon-community-cakes-and-black-boxes.markdown +++ b/_posts/2012-04-16-alavetelicon-community-cakes-and-black-boxes.markdown @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ categories: - Uncategorised --- -[Alavetelicon 2012](http://www.alaveteli.org/about-2/alavetelicon-april-2012/) has finished, the tweeting has subsided, and I think I've just about finished digesting the enormous conference dinner. It was a lot of fun, with [a host of dedicated FOI activists and hackers](http://www.alaveteli.org/about-2/alavetelicon-april-2012/delegates/) who could only make it thanks to the generous funding provided by [Open Society Foundation](http://www.soros.org/) and [Hivos](http://www.hivos.nl/). +[Alavetelicon 2012](http://www.alaveteli.org/about-2/alavetelicon-april-2012/) has finished, the tweeting has subsided, and I think I've just about finished digesting the enormous conference dinner. It was a lot of fun, with [a host of dedicated FOI activists and hackers](http://www.alaveteli.org/about-2/alavetelicon-april-2012/delegates/) who could only make it thanks to the generous funding provided by [Open Society Foundation](http://www.soros.org/) and [Hivos](http://www.hivos.nl/). The [schedule was split into streams](http://www.alaveteli.org/about-2/alavetelicon-april-2012/schedule/), and had lots of non-programmed time, so I only actually saw a small part of it. There are [write-ups](http://www.elvaso.cl/2012/04/alaveteli-conf-2012-otra-comunidad-para-acceso-inteligente) in [various](http://tinyurl.com/7zamxfa) [languages](http://blogs.lanacion.com.ar/data/mundo/conferencia-de-alaveteli-o-de-como-darle-voz-a-la-sociedad-civil/) from other participants; here are some personal observations. @@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ In the UK, we have been accused of encouraging [a confrontational, points-scorin I'm not sure what conclusion to take from this, exactly. It remains the case that Alaveteli must be able to deal with obstinate authorities that don't want to play the game, and it is a prime virtue of the system that it remains well outside the bureaucracies that it aims to hold to account. However, I'm left with a sense that we should examine how we can continue to do this while providing more support to our allies within the System. **2. Cake and fireworks** -Lots of people at the conference asked for more statistics to be made available on Alaveteli sites. mySociety has always been a little reluctant to release statistics, because they are so easy to spin or misinterpret. However, delegates repeatedly referred to their power for campaigning. The psychological impact of a big red cross next to your organisation's name, which you can remedy through positive action, is a powerful motivator. One idea that was mooted was to award a real-life prize (a.k.a. [Cake and Fireworks](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/issues/438)) to the "top" authorities in various categories each year. I think this is a great idea. +Lots of people at the conference asked for more statistics to be made available on Alaveteli sites. mySociety has always been a little reluctant to release statistics, because they are so easy to spin or misinterpret. However, delegates repeatedly referred to their power for campaigning. The psychological impact of a big red cross next to your organisation's name, which you can remedy through positive action, is a powerful motivator. One idea that was mooted was to award a real-life prize (a.k.a. [Cake and Fireworks](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/438)) to the "top" authorities in various categories each year. I think this is a great idea. **3. Black Box APIs** [Acesso Inteligente](www.accesointeligente.org) is an FOI website in Chile that doesn't use Alaveteli. In Chile, all FOI requests must be made via various different web forms. Accesso Inteligente is a tremendous technical achievement which automatically posts requests to the correct organisation's form, and "screen scrapes" the results, giving Chilean citizens a uniform interface to make all FOI requests. diff --git a/_posts/2012-06-20-alaveteli-0-6-fancy-admin-released.markdown b/_posts/2012-06-20-alaveteli-0-6-fancy-admin-released.markdown index 558124b01..780a93529 100644 --- a/_posts/2012-06-20-alaveteli-0-6-fancy-admin-released.markdown +++ b/_posts/2012-06-20-alaveteli-0-6-fancy-admin-released.markdown @@ -10,52 +10,52 @@ categories: - Development --- -Finally Alaveteli 0.6 is out of the door! Grab it from the [github master branch](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/) and try it out. The most obvious new feature is a glossy new administrative interface, based on work started at AlaveteliCon by [@wombleton](https://twitter.com/#%21/wombleton). If you are upgrading, be sure to read the upgrade notes in [CHANGES.md](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/CHANGES.md), and the [new section in the install docs](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/INSTALL.md#upgrading-alaveteli) about upgrading Alavetel[i](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/INSTALL.md#upgrading-alaveteli). Drop a note to the [alaveteli-dev mailing list](http://groups.google.com/group/alaveteli-dev) if you need any help with your upgrade. +Finally Alaveteli 0.6 is out of the door! Grab it from the [github master branch](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/) and try it out. The most obvious new feature is a glossy new administrative interface, based on work started at AlaveteliCon by [@wombleton](https://twitter.com/#%21/wombleton). If you are upgrading, be sure to read the upgrade notes in [CHANGES.md](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/CHANGES.md), and the [new section in the install docs](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/INSTALL.md#upgrading-alaveteli) about upgrading Alavetel[i](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/master/doc/INSTALL.md#upgrading-alaveteli). Drop a note to the [alaveteli-dev mailing list](http://groups.google.com/group/alaveteli-dev) if you need any help with your upgrade. + +[A full list of changes](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues?milestone=13&state=closed) is on Github. Interesting features and bugfixes include: -[A full list of changes](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/issues?milestone=13&state=closed) is on Github. Interesting features and bugfixes include: - * Most Ruby dependencies are now handled by Bundler (thanks [@mckinneyjames](https://twitter.com/#!/mckinneyjames)!) - - * Support for invalidating accelerator cache -- this makes it much less likely, when using Varnish, that users will be presented with stale content. Fixes [issue #436](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/issues/436) - + * Support for invalidating accelerator cache -- this makes it much less likely, when using Varnish, that users will be presented with stale content. Fixes [issue #436](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/436) + + * Adding a `GA_CODE` to `general.yml` will cause the relevant Google Analytics code to be added to your rendered pages - + * It is now possible to have more than one theme installed. The behaviour of multiple themes is now layered in the reverse order they're listed in the config file. See the variable `THEME_URLS` in `general.yml-example` for an example. - + * A new, experimental theme for the administrative interface. It's currently packaged as a standalone theme, but will be merged into the core once it's been tested and iterated in production a few times. Thanks to [@wombleton](https://twitter.com/#!/wombleton) for kicking this off! - + * Alert subscriptions are now referred to as "following" a request (or group of requests) throughout the UI. When a user "follows" a request, updates regarding that request are posted on a new "wall" page. Now they have a wall, users can opt not to receive alerts by email. - + * New features to [support fast post-moderation of bad requests](http://www.alaveteli.org/2012/06/new-feature-easier-request-moderation/): a button for users to report potentially unsuitable requests, and a form control in the administrative interface that hides a request and sends the user an email explaining why. - - * A bug which prevented locales containing underscores (e.g. `en_GB`) was fixed ([issue #503](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/issues/503)) - + * A bug which prevented locales containing underscores (e.g. `en_GB`) was fixed ([issue #503](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/503)) + + * Error pages are now presented with styling from themes There are some blog posts about some of the new features here: - + * [The new admin theme](http://www.alaveteli.org/2012/06/the-new-bootstrap-admin-theme/) - + * [The request moderation features](http://www.alaveteli.org/2012/06/new-feature-easier-request-moderation/) - + * ["Following" and the "wall"](http://www.alaveteli.org/2012/06/new-feature-following-and-the-wall/) - + * [Bundler](http://www.alaveteli.org/2012/06/new-for-developers-bundler-support/) diff --git a/_posts/2012-06-20-the-new-bootstrap-admin-theme.markdown b/_posts/2012-06-20-the-new-bootstrap-admin-theme.markdown index 609334776..2f83eb38f 100644 --- a/_posts/2012-06-20-the-new-bootstrap-admin-theme.markdown +++ b/_posts/2012-06-20-the-new-bootstrap-admin-theme.markdown @@ -16,10 +16,10 @@ One of the major new features in the latest release of Alaveteli is a more attra The theme was started at AlaveteliCon by [@wombleton](https://twitter.com/#!/wombleton). It's based on Twitter's [Bootstrap framework](http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/), a CSS-and-javascript foundation for layout and styling of websites. It tries to collapse the large amounts of data often found on a single page into smaller chunks that can be scanned more easily. -When I started integrating the new code into the Alaveteli core, I realised that this might be quite a big and potentially unwanted step for users who are used to the old interface. So I moved all the interface changes [into their own theme](https://github.com/sebbacon/adminbootstraptheme), which can be installed or uninstalled by changing [a line in the configuration file](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/2e69a53ff5c3e15dd5a7a0fcb5f8fcedf3d6f778/config/general.yml-example#L37). +When I started integrating the new code into the Alaveteli core, I realised that this might be quite a big and potentially unwanted step for users who are used to the old interface. So I moved all the interface changes [into their own theme](https://github.com/mysociety/adminbootstraptheme), which can be installed or uninstalled by changing [a line in the configuration file](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/2e69a53ff5c3e15dd5a7a0fcb5f8fcedf3d6f778/config/general.yml-example#L37). The upshot of this is that instead of specifying a single theme in your site's configuration file, you can now specify a list of themes. When Alaveteli needs to display a help page, or a template, or a CSS file, it starts by looking in the first theme on the list. If the resource isn't there, it works through the other themes in order, until it falls back to the resources provided in Alaveteli itself. This may be useful if you want to borrow someone else's theme but just change the logo or colours; or perhaps if you want to temporarily add a banner at the top of your site to make an announcement about a change in FOI laws in your jurisdiction. -In new installations of Alaveteli 0.6, the admin theme is installed by default, but existing installations that want to try the theme out will need to add it to their config file,[ as per the sample config](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/blob/2e69a53ff5c3e15dd5a7a0fcb5f8fcedf3d6f778/config/general.yml-example#L37) supplied with Alaveteli. +In new installations of Alaveteli 0.6, the admin theme is installed by default, but existing installations that want to try the theme out will need to add it to their config file,[ as per the sample config](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/2e69a53ff5c3e15dd5a7a0fcb5f8fcedf3d6f778/config/general.yml-example#L37) supplied with Alaveteli. The new admin theme includes some new functionality that isn't available in the old theme, and the old theme should be considered deprecated. You can expect the new admin theme to be merged into the Alaveteli core (and the old theme to disappear) by version 0.7, so if you don't like the new look, shout out on the [mailing list](http://groups.google.com/group/alaveteli-dev) before it's too late! diff --git a/_posts/2012-06-28-api-update-now-you-can-create-and-update-requests.markdown b/_posts/2012-06-28-api-update-now-you-can-create-and-update-requests.markdown index d973fb1ef..acabd54f8 100644 --- a/_posts/2012-06-28-api-update-now-you-can-create-and-update-requests.markdown +++ b/_posts/2012-06-28-api-update-now-you-can-create-and-update-requests.markdown @@ -10,4 +10,4 @@ categories: - Uncategorised --- -Version 0.6.1 of the software was recently released with an urgent security update. Also included in this release was an extension of Alaveteli's API, which allows developers to write apps that create and update requests on a per-public body basis. There's the start of some documentation [on the wiki](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/API). +Version 0.6.1 of the software was recently released with an urgent security update. Also included in this release was an extension of Alaveteli's API, which allows developers to write apps that create and update requests on a per-public body basis. There's the start of some documentation [on the wiki](https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/API). |