If you’re not in the mood to read a rant, now might be the time to hit the ‘back’ button. If you are, bear with me while I get something off my chest.
If you follow the news in the UK and you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of days, then you’ll have found it difficult to miss the announcement of the UK Government’s new initiative to make the net safe for us all – IT Safe. I quote:
ITsafe is designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack. Â Â Â It consists of both the Advice on this website, and a low-volume Alerting Service.
All laudable enough, you’d think, so why the rant?
THERE’S NO *&$£@*& RSS FEED!!!
I’m not going to foam at the mouth about how the front page is less to do with securing you against electronic attack than it is a pre-election publicity stunt for headline-grabbing lobby-fodder responsible for the biggest assault on civil rights since the ink dried on the Magna Carta.. Or that they’ve launched the site to provide ‘alerts’ without actually providing any. Or that they specifically disclaim “responsibility for the accuracy, availability, completeness or usefulness of any of the information which is available on, or via, the website or our e-mails.” Or that the site itself looks like it’s been knocked up in a 12-year old’s lunch hour using Frontpage.
But launching a site where the only means of communicating with the target audience is email is cluelessness writ large. Fantastically useful that will be, as the emails pile up in Outlook Express inboxes surrounded by viruses, spam and phishing attempts.
And I don’t care about the argument that says ‘RSS is for geeks, and no-one will know what an RSS feed is’. This is a site (allegedly) put together by people who know enough about IT and technology to at least have heard of RSS. The effort of creating an RSS feed would have been trivial in the scale of the no-doubt six-figure sum that has been spent on creating this. It was an opportunity to show that there IS an alternative to email as a means of distributing this kind of information, and it’s been wasted.
I predict that this site will be updated spasmodically until after May 5th, and will then decay quietly as it collects digital tumbleweed like the pre-election stunt it is.
There, I feel better now. Rant over.
Funny that, I had a very similar title for my entry and the first few sentences. But I didn’t get as far as complaining about a missing RSS feed, as I thought the site is pointless in the first place.
Whilst I can’t comment on the political motivations behind it, I completely agree that the site is amazingly useless. And yes, how they missed out on an RSS feed beats me.