Just a quick heads up. Later today, the Product Recalls site will move to its own dedicated domain, recalledproducts.org.
If you are a registered user, you don’t need to do anything at your end, but email alerts and RSS feeds will reflect the name change. The old domain should redirect all requests automatically.
Following user feedback over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on a number of changes to the Product Recalls website. These changes were pushed out to the server yesterday, so let us know what you think.
Categorisation
This was a big request from the early users of the website and something we wanted to bring in as soon as we could. We currently have over 380 recalls stored in the database, and each week this grows by around 40. This means there are over 38 pages of notices to go through and leads to some quite hefty emails going out. As it stands, people who sign up get sent every recall we find – not everyone is interested in angle grinders or laser pointers.
Today’s website brings in full categorisation. You can now browse through recalls for a particular category, for example clothing, motor cars, or gas appliances. When you search for an item, this can be filtered by category. Each category comes with its own RSS feed so you can subscribe to the updates that interest you. Also, it’s now possible to filter the email alerts you receive. Just select the category from the options on the sign up form. For example, if you just want to be notified about toys, then that is all we will send you.
To give you some idea of the state of the database – toys & other children’s equipment make up just under a third of the database, and clothing & fashion items take up about 25% of the website.
Improved Import Script
We’ve also made a few changes to the way the import script works. This allows us to detect when items are removed from the EC website. While we do not follow their practice of removing them from the site, we will be marking with them a ‘removed’ tag.
Other Tweaks
There are a few other tweaks around the website, such as the addition of pagination to searches, increasing the number of items in the RSS feeds and adding social media sharing buttons to the recall item pages. Hopefully these will help make the site easier and more useful to use.
Open Sourced Code
Finally, we’ve now open sourced the code for the website. This means that you can download the code to power your own projects. This is an important step for us and marks the first piece of work to be open sourced.
To get the code, just pop along to our Github repository. If you use the code, let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it!
As always, we appreciate all comments, so please take a look at the updated site and let us know what you think.
We’ve been talking for a while about the first project that we’ve been building, and today we’re pleased to be able to switch on the Product Recalls website.
The issue of product recalls is a tricky one. Some companies publish notices in the national newspapers or display a poster in their shop window. Some of these notices are published on the Trading Standards Institute website; others are published on the European Commission Consumer Affairs site. However, without checking these sources regularly, there is no easy way of discovering if something you have bought has been recalled.
The website aims to solve this problem. It collects UK and European product recall notices from the European Commission and publishes them via RSS and email. You can sign up for weekly or monthly email alerts, search the database of recalls for keywords (such as product or brand name), and subscribe to them through your RSS reader.
We’ve tried to build the site so that recalled products can easily be found in existing search engines – an issue not considered by some of the other solutions.
The site is in its first iteration, so we will be looking at how we can improve the offering over the next few months. In the mean time, take a look at the site and let us know any comments and suggestions you have.
As we mentioned in our last post, we’ve been busy working away on our first CF Labs project. We’re nearly there, and are gearing up for its launch.
Late last week, we released an early beta version of the site to a number of people within Consumer Focus, and those signed up to our mailing list. Since then, we’ve gathered some feedback, and are making some final few tweaks before launching the site as a public beta. Once these little bits are done, and we’ve solved some last minute logistical issues, we’ll let you know.
Keep your eyes peeled ;-)
What have we been up to? Pt. 2
By Dafydd Vaughan Wednesday March 3, 2010
In our last update we talked about some of the new responsibilities we’ve inherited and what our plans were for the next few months. We wanted to give you all an update on what we’ve been up to since then and what we’ve still to do.
Consumer Focus Corporate Website
Since then we’ve been working on the second phase of work – a complete content restructure and update to make content easier to find across Consumer Focus’ target audiences. This, together with several tweaks to the look and feel of the site (designed to take advantage of some of the features available in Wordpress), will be completed in the next few weeks.
Both phases have been a huge undertaking, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible to make changes in the future, hence the switch to Wordpress. One of the advantages of the Wordpress platform is that it is so easy to extend. Where we need to add in new functionality, it is likely a plugin already exists to do the job. If it doesn’t, creating one is fairly straightforward.
For those that are interested in some of the technical aspects- the site now uses Wordpress MU on a LAMP platform. We control all the code through our SVN repositories and deploy to the servers using Capistrano. This is almost identical to the way in which we manage our other projects such as this site and Recalled Products.
Guidelines for public sector websites
As some of you may be aware, the Central Office of Information (COI) publishes a set of guidelines for UK public sector websites. We’ve spent a fair amount of time working out what we need to do to reach compliance and we’ll be making the necessary adaptations to all Consumer Focus and Labs websites over the coming months.
Does Directgov Deliver?
If you want to comment on the report, head over to the website. Comments will be closing soon but the website will remain online. Sign up to the mailing list on the website (powered by Google Groups) to be kept up-to-date on Consumer Focus’s work on Directgov.
We are now looking at how we can improve the process of collecting comments on our reports, so keep an eye out for future experiments like this.
Recalled Products
As you may have noticed, in December we turned on another set of features on the Recalled Products website. We now pull in photos and related documents for products when they are available. We’re also experimenting with producing some statistics on the number of recalls we import every week, what categories they are in and what the dangers are. Let us know what you think of these and how we can improve them.