I love testing in production. The thrill of accidentally publishing some dummy data - or taking down an entire website - is similar to skydiving without a parachute. Exquisite excitement followed by heart-stopping terror.
Before going live with a new website or service, it's sensible to test how text looks on it. Most people don't test with readable text - it's too easy for management to start reading the content rather than looking at the layout. So the default is the Latin text "Lorem ipsum". Latin looks enough like English to get a feel for how text will render - but most people can't read it so they gloss over the words and look at the layout.
Say, it sure would be annoying if those dummy pages ever made their way to production, right?!?
One of the things that's fascinating about seeing testing data in a live environment is that you get a small peek behind the curtain of how a site was made. A tiny glimpse into the minds of the people who made it.
Who was Alice? Did she enjoy her time working on the London Councils' website?
Was she friends with Henry at Lambeth council? We may never know.
Some of the placeholders eventually become load-bearing. For reasons which remain inscrutable to those who follow, the Elders declared some pages must remain sacrosanct forever!
What would happen if that page were deleted? Would you dare risk it?
Sometimes finding a test page leads to a dead end. A stub of a page which should have been purged before go-live.
But other times it can lead us to a page hinting at something more. Deeper tests of long-forgotten functionality.
What did those plugins do? Aaaaaaaa indeed!
The purpose of this post isn't to point and laugh, it's to show that searching for dummy data is a good way to find interesting things. It might show you a style-guide, or lead to you to a forgotten and outdated plugin, or it might lead you to an entire pre-production environment.
Finally, this image was on one of the FCDO blog posts. I assume that means it is available under the Open Government Licence and, therefore, I can start T-Shirt production immediately!
3 thoughts on “Lorem Ipsum Dot Gov Dot UK”
There's a fun game on sites like archive.org to search for these kinds of filler phrases in old published books. There's another one which I forget which I found in a newspaper article from a long time ago - they used filler expecting an article which then was never used..
| Reply to original comment on inkwell.social
Semi-related, @lesteph.com made a lorem ipsum generator years ago which used random paragraphs from government press releases, which neatly made things more realistic while still avoiding being real. But would make finding accidentally published pages rather harder.
| Reply to original comment on bsky.app
@Edent once I have time I still intend to make a blog post called “but its only test data, it’ll never make it to production” with these kind of examples
| Reply to original comment on mastodon.scot
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