Welfare to work, web stuff, other

Sources:
Nick Flood for this particular version
padraicb for what appears to be the original, as far as I can tell

I've been mostly inactive in online stuff on all fronts for some time, owing to a range of professional and personal demands that didn't fit well with communicating more widely. Life is still in flux, but there are lots of exciting and hopeful possibilities out there.

A certain portion of the press seems to have gone back to war against the 'dole scroungers' of late. This includes seizing on various government proposals as being ways of tightening up the benefits system. However, some of these proposals seem, at first glance, awfully familiar. For example, 'mandated work experience' and 'losing benefits for turning down a reasonable job offer' have both been around for yonks.

After finding out a bit more about Merlin's web portal earlier this week, I've been thinking about online tendering support. Roughly speaking, bidding can be split into five areas:

I've been thinking about this topic for a while now. Some brief thoughts, with more to follow. I've used a lot of bullet points to lay out the main areas quickly:

Strangely, the only version of this amazingly useful tool is in Japanese. Perhaps some beneficent job site could step forward and convert the all-new jobhunting edition of this classic typing tutor shoot 'em up to English? The Work Programme needs good computer-based support, and this could provide truly original added value to any delivery bid.

Part of the reason I set the site up in this way is to test out something called Drupal 7, the latest (and just finished) version of a popular content management framework. Both the Indus Delta site and the BASE website run on Drupal 6 (as do whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk among many others), and I wanted to get used to the changes in the new version and take the opportunity to learn more about the internals and maybe have a bash at learning some more PHP.

The site's now live, although I'll be tuning it up and probably breaking it on a regular basis for some months to come. If you find my writings outrageously interesting then the RSS feed is fairly stable, and I should be able to set up feeds by tag at some point, so you can ignore all the dull welfare to work articles / musings about Rock Band [delete as appropriate]. Comments are enabled, with some fairly clever spam protection.