Disqus - Latest Comments for James Goffin

Re: Who’s using Dreamweaver then?

James Goffin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:18:06 -0000

Dreamweaver doesn't stop you writing HTML by hand - you can always dive in to the source code directly - but it does make some tedious jobs easier. I know table tags have got a bad name thanks to the rise of CSS, but it's much easier to sort a table visually using something like DW than it is to track through all the tags by hand.
Some bits of DW like it's templating can also be useful for ensuring consistency across pages and stopping people breaking stuff by accident.
As for teaching "basic CMS use" what exactly does that mean? Most sites use their own custom content management systems.

Re: East London Advertiser secures online Downing Street petition - Press Gazette

James Goffin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:59:55 -0000

Good work by our Archant colleagues, but the East Anglian Daily Times had a petition on the 10 Downing Street site back in January in support of our campaign to keep open Post Offices in Suffolk and Essex.
Not sure if we were the first...

Re: Care in the community

James Goffin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:17:46 -0000

"P2 - We are then told ‘fewer than one in five voters were happy with Brown’s premiership’. That means none."
No it doesn't. It could be one in six voters or one in ten - it's crassly expressed, but the inference is wrong.

Re: WI campaigns against local paper sex ads - Press Gazette

James Goffin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:14:05 -0000

Last year Hampshire WI voted to support the legalisation of prostitution, so it seems a bit sweeping to claim mass support for this from the WI.
And this from the National Federation of Women's Institutes website: "The NFWI does not have any resolutions on the ethics, legalisation, decriminalisation or criminalisation of prostitution, and therefore does not have any policy, campaigns or position on the issue. The NFWI is unable to comment on issues on which it does not have a resolution."

Re: ‘the’ Observer brought down to size by Guardian group’s new integrated style guide

James Goffin — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:19:17 -0000

I'd hazard a guess that it was previously "PIN number" as it's an acronym derived from Personal Indentification Number.

Re: ‘the’ Observer brought down to size by Guardian group’s new integrated style guide

James Goffin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:32:43 -0000

Er, yes as The Times' style guide points out: "PIN (not Pin), personal identification number. Do not write PIN number, which is a tautology "
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/tools_and_serv...

Re: Publisher condemns 'deeply flawed' web traffic ruling - Press Gazette

James Goffin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:13:21 -0000

Sadly it's not just as simple as IP matches - because there aren't enough IP addresses to go round they are frequently shared between multiple users, either within large organisations or by internet providers.
So you then start supplementing that with cookies to try to overcome the limitation, but first and third party cookies potentially given different results.
You then start considering that the number of PCs accessing your site isn't always the same as the number of people because they might use separate home and work PCs for example, or many people might share the same PC.
Website stats give a false impression of being incredibly accurate when there are really lots of compromises built in.
The key is establishing a common way of recording so at least the basis of comparison across sites is reliable, even if the raw figures are flawed.

Re: The plural of anecdote is not data — even when it’s ‘crowdsourced’

James Goffin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:34:29 -0000

Plus ça change...
There are new things happening in online journalism but calling tip offs from readers 'crowdsourcing' doesn't give them any more inherent value.
The speed and scale of the interaction may have changed, but the basic mechanic is still the same.

Re: Which CMS do they use in online journalism utopia?

James Goffin — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 08:28:13 -0000

It's not just the fault of the CMS. There's a fundamental difference in the way you handle information to do all the sparkly stuff that is alien to knocking out a piece of text.
To do a football league table as plain text you can just type it, bung in few tabs and you're done. To make that interactive you need a database table for the teams, for each result, some script to work out the points and generate the table.
Open that up to a big competition like the FA Cup and you need an index that includes every club in the country. Or you could just type the text in, bung in a few tabs...
Journalists are used to working with words and not data; they are two different disciplines that have a lot to offer each other, but different nonetheless.