Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Downing Street website says Wegg-Prosser "a prat, but not the prat"

More insanity joy for you from the flashy new Number 10 website that New Media Maze say was ever so very complex and difficult to do. Take the page listing the Cabinet. Scroll down and what do you see?


Hmmm whatever are those link? What could BWP Home be about? Oh look, it's about Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Blair former man in Number 10. Is it slagging him off or being nice about him? Who knows, is he a prat? Did the person that created this page that was presumably hidden in the old website have an issue with Benji, or "the prat" a reference to Brown? I wonder how Time Warner feel about Downing Street claiming Crown Copyright on an image of Harry Potter?


Who is Adam and why was he testing, and what's with the question mark after the bit that says "the new PM?"? Such a professional website don't you think?


Still we always have the test page which says "tent". Perhaps this was an aspiration about the whole "big tent" strategy? I still wonder why it is an enabled page though. What other gems that were once hidden on Downing Street have now been made visible for the world?


Perhaps there will be more evidence of the Blair/Brown love-in with pages like BWP that slag off former ministers. Oh how we all love good Easter Eggs and the surprises they reveal!

Update: more broken stuff found by Mike Rouse here.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

What amazes me is New Media Maze's comment that things like this always happen with new site rollouts and beta versions.

Except that in the corporate world, no they don't. It's called TESTING!

You deploy the site to a select number of users on a temporary url or using HOSTS files and test it, things like this then get fixed before launch!

Anonymous said...

So, bala blaglagflafdgadf is the new PM, has the Queen been told?

Anonymous said...

The current No. 10 site is actually the development site.

They never bothered to rebuild a new clean production site and ditch the dev site with all it's odd comments and internal IP addressess.

Anonymous said...

Anyone used the digg links on these posts yet? :D

Anonymous said...

It seems that Downing Street is also able to perform the remarkable feat of time-travel.

Many of the appointments to Brown's cabinet were seemingly made some years ago.

For example Peter Hain's June 2007 appointment to Brown's cabinet was announced on 31 January 2003. If memory serves Blair was still PM at that time. Was this another Granita understanding?

see: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page1399

The Open Sourcerer said...

This is fucking hilarious.

Thanks Dizzy.

Anonymous said...

The date of the "BWP Home" post is 4/5/07, before Mr Blair left No 10, so I am not sure what this has to do with Mr Brown etc etc.

BWP (the real one)

dizzy said...

Well it's calling you a prat but you;re not "the prat" i.e. who is "the prat"? The man next door?

Anonymous said...

It seems this site accurately reflects this government's attitude to government. Totally slipshod and bodged together on an as needed basis

dizzy said...

That is to say, the man next door at the time of the post?

Anonymous said...

The whole "BWP is a prat" thing seems to be linked to his coming up with the idea of e-petitions: see eg http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1401042.ece

Anonymous said...

Wow, the website has teething issues?!?! Really?!
It really isn't just silly season for the newspapers is it?

dizzy said...

"teething issues"? Sheer bloody incompetence more like.

Tastes like chicken said...

Although it was a quiet news day on June 26th, luckily you can "Add some text here if you wish"

http://www.number10.gov.uk/topics/news/latest-news/page/8

...if you hear of anything else silly happening that day.

Anonymous said...

I hope that Time Warner's legal department have been informed about Crown Copyright being claimed on Harry Potter pictures... I'm no expert, but they could be entitled to a royalty payment.

Anonymous said...

'tastes like chicken' is right...

If you go back through the Previous Entries in the Latest News for a few pages (to 26 June)(or follow his link), you'll start to find the line 'You can also add text here if you wish, or delete it if not.'

It looks like placekeeper text for various Headers that someone was too useless to edit. The headers themselves (accessed from the sidebar) seem to be OK, so it's not clear why there are 'Header' entries in the News at all.

However it does reveal a 'Healthy Britain Header' with the tag 'test' which is not accessible otherwise.

At least we can be confident that ID Cards will be totally secure, eh.

Anonymous said...

Searching for 'tent' on the site throws up well over 500 hits, mostly pages where something more meaningful than the word 'tent' would be appropriate. How odd.

Still, it's only a website representing the centre of government for the country...

Andrew Zalotocky said...

> a prat, but not the prat

Sounds like Harry Hutton's like a trouser, but not a trouser. Chase me ladies, I'm in the cabinet!