api mobile vote voteuk · 3 comments · 400 words
After the tragic death of Ernest Marples, I'm sorry to say that the site fell in to a bit of disrepair. With no postcode data and no new boundary data, it looked like VoteUK was going to be permanantly out of business. Thanks - once again - to the clever-clogs at TheyWorkForYou, at least half of the problem has been solved. The API call getConstituency now has a future parameter. Adding …
Continue reading →free our data government linked data · 2 comments · 850 words · Viewed ~1,921 times
One of the problems with creating a service which deals with elections, is that boundaries change. One year you might be in the Electoral Constituency of Woking, the next year it might be Guildford. Boundaries have to shift in order to keep each MP with roughly the same number of constituents. The work to determine how these boundaries should be formed is done by The Boundary Commission. They …
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As you may recall from previous instalments of my thrilling blog, I'm trying to find the location of every polling station in the UK. This is proving to be rather tricky - if not impossible. The data aren't centrally held and, in any case, polling stations aren't announced until an election is called. So I went for the next best thing. Using the wonderful What Do They Know site to make a Fr…
Continue reading →democracy GE2024 · 450 words · Viewed ~261 times
In an ideal world, people wouldn't drop litter. There would be plentiful bins and people would be responsible with their rubbish. In a slightly less ideal world, the local council would have enough money to clean up the mess left by people. But we don't live in an ideal world. People are ignorant and selfish. Councils are cash-strapped. So, once in a while, I'll go litter picking. I strap on a…
Continue reading →css hacking HTML5 Responsible Disclosure · 3 comments · 50 words · Viewed ~428 times
A bit of a thought experiment - similar to my Minimum Viable XSS and SVG injection investigations. I recently found a popular website which echoed back user input. It correctly sanitised < to < to prevent any HTML injection. Except… It let through <h2> elements unaltered! Why? I suspect because the output was: <h2>Your search for ... returned no results</h2> And, somehow, the parser was g…
Continue reading →3,900 words · Viewed ~2,150 times
Sometimes people are kind enough to cite my works in their books, research papers, and reports. Here is an incomplete list: Table of Contents2009201020112012201320142015201620172018201920202021202220232024Official PublicationsAcknowledgmentsTweetsMiscellany 2009 Donate Minutes Via Your Mobile (2009)🔗 Bogdan, Pamela AM. Methods, systems, and computer program products for mobile network su…
Continue reading →data data.gov.uk geek government Open Data opentech voteuk · 3 comments · 1,050 words · Viewed ~282 times
A quick report on OpenTech 2010 - the London event for geeks interested in Government data, openness and generally doing good things with tech and data. Copyright Matt Jones used under a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence. I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk…
Continue reading →api Open Source voteuk · 250 words
As I mentioned in my last post about VoteUK, I found the TheyWorkForYou API to be a little lacking when it came to image sizing. I posted a request asking if there was a pattern to the image sizes and, if not, was it possible to have the sizes returned in the API. The "standard" open source reply - "fix it yerself" - was predictably swift. So I did. The source code is remarkably accessible -…
Continue reading →data free our data linked data post codes post office postcode Royal Mail · 2 comments · 250 words
VoteUK is no more. In order to precisely show you where your electoral registration office was, I needed to take its postcode and covert it to latitude and longitude. That's the service Ernest Marples provided. A few days ago, the Post Office - in their infinite wisdom - set their legal dogs on those running Ernest Marples. The Post Office charges for the file that they generated which c…
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