Tag Archives: Wordpress

brusselsblog.eu – a little project for readers in the EU capital?

Back a couple of years ago when I lived in Brussels I was struck by the lack of good quality information online in English about life in the city. Too many people in Brussels for work in and around the EU institutions never see the best of Brussels, and the idea was to create a blog – www.brusselsblog.eu – that would address that need. The inspiration was drawn from the French language BXL Blog.

Anyway, I still own the domain name, WordPress is installed and running, and I have an initial expression of assistance from @bramsmets on Twitter. The need for the blog very much still exists. Anyone else want to chip in and help? If so please comment here, or contact me!

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The requirements for a personal blog, 2011 style

Back in the autumn of last year I did a partial redesign of this blog. Since then the blog has sprouted all kinds of buttons, and looks a bit of a mess. In the meantime WordPress has evolved to version 3.2 and offers a whole bunch of new features. So what, I wonder, are the criteria for the ultimate personal blog in the summer of 2011, and how am I going to change this blog to achieve those aims? Here are my first thoughts.

Feel free to comment on / improve upon the list below! Continue reading →

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How MEPs should organise their web comms and social networking

I was a speaker yesterday at the Nordic-Baltic Youth Forum 2011 in Narva, Estonia. The slides from my presentation are here, but this post is about an issue that was on my mind all day – how Members of the European Parliament should organise their web presence. The 3 MEPs at the event in Narva - Emilie Turunen, Kristiina Ojuland and Radvilė Morkūnaitė-Mikulėnienė – all have personal websites and some presence on social media, but judging by their comments on the panels they struggle to make the most of the technology, and find it hard to work out what they should do and what their staff should do. So here’s a plan for them.

Click to enlarge
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EU Navfor website – tell them what you think of their mission

When EU institutional comms are not up to scratch I say so – see posts about the EEAS, Citzalia and the Citizens’ Initiative for example. So it’s only fair, in return, when I see a good example of what the European Union is doing to give some credit where credit’s due.


I was hence very happy to see how the European Union Naval Force Somalia – Operation ATALANTA is presented on the web. The site has an engaging, news style design, and the homepage makes good use of photos and even some video. There’s a tag cloud, RSS, and the option to share each article on social networks, and it’s possible to comment directly on articles. Plus the whole thing is built on WordPress.

I am in no position to politically judge whether this mission is working well or not (more about it on Wikipedia here), but at least they are managing to cover the basics well and draw together the news of what they are doing in a contemporary and reasonably interesting manner.

I’m sure my critics will say, well, yes, this is just a small mission. Perhaps. But it’s also a sensitive matter, and they are making a good effort in their external communications, an effort the rest of the EU institutions would do well to learn from.

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New blog design – a work in progress

As you can see I’ve had a bit of a clean up around here…

The blog design is now much whiter and simpler, with a clearer emphasis on the content of the blog posts. Because I needed a swift solution I’ve based the design on the excellent Wu Wei theme by Jeff Ngan. Not only is the typography of this theme neat, but it also is a very easy theme to customise if you know some HTML – no complicated functions.php files. The site is of course running with WordPress still.

One of the main reasons for the upgrade was the incompatibility of my old theme with Topsy, Sociable and other equivalent plugins to share content on various social networks. Those buttons have now been added – question now is whether anyone is going to use them!

Secondly I’ve been meaning to reorganise the content here for some time, reflecting the changing focus of my work and my interests. The blog now has only 4 categories – EUPolitics, UKPolitics, techPolitics and notPolitics. The first three of these are rather self explanatory, and all my other musings will end up in ‘notPolitics’. There’s a link to each of these in the top menu, and RSS feeds for each (and for combinations of the categories) can be found here.

A few things need to be tidied up still (the footer for sure), and the site hasn’t been tested in IE at all yet, so it’s very much a work in progress. But better to make a start I reasoned!

Photo: Jo Peattie “wash and brush up” March 10, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution
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A small milestone – 5 years of the Euroblog

5 Years Birthday Cake - CC / Flickr

5 Years Birthday Cake - CC / Flickr

On 19th July 2005 I wrote a small blog entry about my frustrations with Ryanair, and also explained my blogging debut. “Am I too late jumping on the blogging bandwaggon?” I mused at the time. Looking back it for sure was not too late, and indeed many of the top blogs – especially those on the left in the UK – have ceased. When it comes to blogging about the EU, only Nosemonkey has been at it longer.

It has been an interesting road since then, racking up – at the time of writing – 1208 posts and 7584 comments. Almost every one of the posts has at least one image – rather rare for a political blog.

In 2006 the blog was rated 10th best in UK politics in Iain Dale’s lists (2006 and 2007 scores here) before dropping off the UK blogging radar due to excessive EU geekiness. My 2006 failure at the Commission entrance exams has created one of the most active places to discuss the concours with 3516 comments so far across 2 posts. A post in September 2007 (updated here) led to the creation of Bloggingportal.eu. The biggest thing I’ve ever done – the Atheist Bus Campaign – started from this post in 2008, while 2009 saw the Gender Balanced Commission campaign launched from the blog. In 2010 the blog has been rated 5th most influential about the EU.

My mind works in eccentric ways, and the blog posts reflect that. From my sporting pursuits to Eurostar to the travails of the European left, from the quandaries of food emissions to World Cup footballs to the stupidity of Boris Johnson’s routemaster plans – it’s all been covered.

From a technical point of view the blog started off on pLog and for the last 4 years has been running WordPress. It has been hosted in at least 3 places, currently by the excellent EZPZ Hosting. Over the past 18 months I’ve also become a dedicated Twitter user (@jonworth) to complement the blogging, and surpassed 2000 followers the day before the 5 year anniversary of the blog.

Above all blogging has allowed me to meet excellent people all over the place, to be invited to all kinds of events and to build all sorts of projects with the people I’ve met. It’s been a hard road sometimes, but I’m never short of ideas or thoughts, and the blog has been (and will continue to be) my canvas to express what’s on my mind. Here’s to the next 5 years!

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Diane 4 Leader – it’s not about the candidate as such, it’s more important than that

“If in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since” was a classic line from an interview in The Guardian with Clay Shirky, one of the foremost thinkers about internet and society. If you’ve never heard of Shirky then read the full piece. Needless to say I agree with him – the internet is changing our society, our politics, in ways we can only just begin to understand.

It’s in that context that I’m doing the website design and strategy for Diane Abbott’s Labour leadership bid.

“From Shirky to Abbott? Is he mad?” you’re probably thinking. Let me explain.

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From Dahab to Place St Boniface, from scuba to espresso, how far can you take social media promotion?

BlomqvistsI had an hour between meetings today so called for the first time at Blomqvist’s, a Swedish espresso bar on Place St Boniface in Brussels (no website yet, but FB page is here). It was a cold January morning and the place was rather empty, so while munching my Kanellebulle I got chatting to Ulric Nordin, the owner of the place, about his business strategy and how to get more clients through the door and – importantly – clients at the right times of day. “They queue out of the door on Saturdays” he told me, “but as you can see now, daytimes during the week it’s quiet“.
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