I redeveloped West Yorkshire Probation Board's website as part of my full time employment there. The work was undertaken in partnership with Azem William Interactive Design. Azem provided the visual concept and I constructed the databases, the styelsheets and did the development coding in PHP.

Like the NPRIE site, the site does need to be updatable by non-technical users so the site is very simple. The site uses CSS extensively to make it look more complex than it actually is. Fundamentally, though, each page is simply text with the option of one image. The home page, which has more images, is put together from 4 or 5 separate tables (one for the vacancies, one for the publications, one for the home page "feature", one for the "meet the team" feature etc).

The site is written in XHTML and fulfils all the automatic checks of the Web Accessibility Initiative.

In the coming months, it is my intention to code up the editing suite to allow staff to edit and add pages; and to make the West Yorkshire Probation library catalogue available. I am currently considering whether to use an off the shelf solution for this or to develop something myself.

Like Just Published, Reading Lists is a simple site that integrates with My-RSS and Blackwell's online bookshop.

With this service, targeted chiefly at Universities and Colleges in the UK, users can classify their lists - with the intention that they will classify them by institution, course, module etc. Again, users are able to accrue commission from sales arising from their lists.

Just Published is a simple web tool that integrates with the Blackwell Online Bookshop affiliate programme and converts new book lists, created with My-RSS.CO.UK, into html lists with titles, summaries, price, availability and front cover thumbnails.

I have set up a number of book lists - generally on subjects that interest me. But there are innumerable subjects available for others to create lists on. In return, contributors can accrue commission on sales arising from their lists as I can link Blackwell Affiliate accounts (other than my own) with lists.

My-RSS.CO.UK is a simple rss feed generator that I developed (privately) to help with the production of news bulletins in my day job. I use the website every day to keep colleagues at West Yorkshire Probation Board (and more generally in the Criminal Justice System) about the latest news in Criminal Justice. There is also a feed for West Yorkshire News.

The site has developed quite rapidly from being little more than a form-fed database - to a relatively sophisticated tool for aggregating news. It's aim has always been to facilitate the creation of human focused, topical RSS feeds.

In addition to adding items to feeds by entering them into a form, it is also possible to:

Add by "Cherry Picking"
Users can store regularly consulted RSS feeds from other news sites in their profile - and then quickly "cherry pick" relevant items from these feeds for their own feed. This speeds up the process of creating a news feed considerably as no inputting is required.

Add by "Scraping"
For some websites, I created profiles that allow My-RSS to "scrape" the headline, summary, date etc from individual news pages. All the user needs to do is supply the URL. This has been extended to facilitate the creation of book lists. The user simply has to specify the ISBN and the website will scrape the bibliographic detail of the book from the Blackwell Online Bookshop website. Separate websites have been created to host these lists - though, of course, they can also be distributed as RSS feeds.

The latest development is some simple statistical reporting tools to allow users to see how well their (and other) lists are doing.

For more information about developments with My-RSS, see the My-RSS blog.