The Power Commission

6 Comments

  1. Chris – Could you throw together a short note on the software you used to put it together? Like for many barely-techies in small charities, it’s extremely helpful for me to understand what it takes to create these kind of sites.

  2. It’s really simple, actually — we just used WordPress, a blogging program (as used for this site), and stuck the sections of the report in as individual posts, in descending chronological order so that they appear the right way up. The text was extracted from the original PDF file using pdftotext (from the xpdf distribution), though a bit of proofreading was required since that lost some non-ASCII characters.

    That said, if we’d wanted to do anything significantly more complicated, WordPress mightn’t have been the best place to start.

  3. Michael McCarthy

    It’s great having a forum for discussion of Power, but are people who contribute to it being notified when a response to their postings appears? I’ve posted several comments which have sparked off replies, but my emails alerting me to the fact have come my way.

  4. Michael McCarthy

    It’s great having a forum for discussion of Power, but are people who contribute to it being notified when a response to their postings appears? I’ve posted several comments which have sparked off replies, but no emails alerting me to the fact have come my way.

  5. It does not take a report of 100+ pages written by what are presumably party hacks to tell a more perceptive and better educated electorate that voting is an increasingly pointless and meaningless activity. The increasing refinement of survey and statistical tools to identify for politicians what they have to do in order to win turns what was previously a “debate of ideologies” (in a world of imperfect information) into a marketing and branding exercise. I have no time for political hacks who don’t care a damn about what people believe in because they are too busy “selling themselves” to floating voters simply because the latter are either so corruptable or so retarded that they are systematically vulnerable to deliberate manipulation via the media.