Category Archives: Development

What’s new with PlanningAlerts, part 1

The last couple of months have seen a mammoth development effort on PlanningAlerts. Throughout that time we’ve posted regular updates on the PlanningAlerts Twitter feed. Follow us there if you’re interested in the absolute latest and greatest. The purpose of this post is to bring together and summarise those changes, to make it easier to […]

Also posted in PlanningAlerts.org.au | 2 Responses

Little OpenAustralia Hackfest, Big Results

Cross-posted on the Official Google Australia Blog. A couple of weeks ago we at the OpenAustralia Foundation – Australia’s open data, open government and civic hacking charity – asked if anyone wanted to join three of our volunteers at Google Sydney for a hackfest. The request was deliberately casual as we just wanted have a […]

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OpenAustralia Hackfest – “What are you up to next weekend?” edition

Come and join Henare, Tim and Matthew in their basement, er.. we mean Google Sydney, for an awesome weekend of hacking. It’s all a bit last minute. What’s the worst that happens? Nobody turns up and the three of us spend the weekend hacking. That’s okay too. However, it would be much more fun if […]

Also posted in Announcement, ElectionLeaflets.org.au, OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org, PlanningAlerts.org.au, Projects | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Response

Clock has run out on Victorian election monitoring

On Saturday the 27th of November 2010 Victorians are going to the polls with the very big job of electing their next state government. That is a little over a month away. Two weeks ago, a few of us who had worked on ElectionLeaflets.org.au during the Federal election got together to talk about what we […]

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Browse local council websites for 15 minutes and make a big difference to PlanningAlerts.org.au

As you may know PlanningAlerts.org.au works by collecting development applications from many local council websites and republishes them in an easy to use way, notifying people of new applications in their area and in that way keeping you informed of things happening near you. To do this we need to know where those applications are. […]

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Embed a PlanningAlerts Google Map in your blog

Inspired by Matthew Somerville’s post over at the mySociety blog about Embedding a FixMyStreet Google map in a blog, here’s how to embed a PlanningAlerts Google Map in your blog, like this one for Newtown, NSW: View Larger Map From the instructions on the API page, we can work out how to get an RSS […]

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Search engines are how people find out about stuff

It’s an easy thing to forget when you’re building a website: people find stuff using search engines. Most of the the time they won’t remember the name of your website and decide to go there. They’ll look something up on Google or one of the miriad other search engines and it will haphazardly lead them […]

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PlanningAlerts – going back to basics

Back in December of last year, we launched PlanningAlerts. It was a massive rush getting the site up and running. We had only seven weeks to build the site, including the scrapers, the bits of software that get all the planning data from the local council websites. We had applied to the Government 2.0 Taskforce […]

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From the workshop: OpenAustralia Labs

What do you do in your spare time during a busy, week-long conference? A) Relax B) Have a beer C) Set up new OpenAustralia sites If you’re one of our volunteers, Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell or your author, Henare Degan, you answered ‘C’ – well, OK, and a bit of ‘B’ too : ) During last […]

Also posted in Announcement | Tagged , | 1 Response

Two great hackfest days!

(Cross posted to the offical Google Australia Blog) Last weekend, OpenAustralia held its second hackfest at Google’s Sydney office. If you haven’t come across OpenAustralia.org before, it’s a volunteer run website which helps you to find out what your representatives get up to in parliament with the aim of bridging the growing democratic disconnect that […]

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