What’s new
MP and Councillor online databases
Oultwood has produced two internet database of MP and councillor website links.
These databases can be accesses via the MP and Councillor list pages.
These features allow you to produce numerous different MP and Council website lists.
Council online database
Oultwood has produced an internet database of council website links.
This database can be accesses via the council lists facility.
This feature allow you to produce numerous different council website lists.
Server-side scripting
Oultwood is gradually convering the whole site to PHP.
This upgrade will produce more targeted web pages.
For example, the a-z listing on a particular county page will just show council website for that particular country.
Council Minutes System
OUltwood has produced a number of demonstration versions of its Council Minutes System.
Demonstrations of the latest version of the Oultwood council documents system can be seen at www.councildocuments.co.uk.
Some of these demonstrations are password protected - if you wish to view them contact us using the contact us page.
The Oultwood system is exceptional in that it is extremely fast and accesses individual minutes rather than complete meeting documents that are both slow to download and hard to use to find a particular minute.
The various demonstrations contains council minutes from a number of different councils.
Each minute within these demonstartions can be accessed by a variety of routes including a specialist search engine.
The latest release contains a specially designed PHP minutes search engine.
This search engine has been designed to meet the specialist needs of minutes searching and is extremely fast.
An initial WAP version that utilises XML technology has now been set-up.
This initial version contains a complete copy of the internet version specially adapted for WAP.
You can access these pages by using the following URL:
http://www.councilminutes.net//wap/index.wml - standard WAP source
http://www.councilminutes.net//wap/index.wmlc - compiled WAP source
Language indicators
Language indicators are now being added to the Oultwood local government index.
This means that any site that has foreign language pages within it can be easily identified.
Huge increase in usage
The Oultwood index has now been running for over six years.
During all this time it has been provided as a free service funded by Oultwood with a small amount of help from page sponsors.
Sinces its launch in the beginning of 1998, there has been a huge increase in usage of the Oultwood index.
There has been a steady increase in the use of the index with occasional large surges in use.
For instance, in December 2006, there were almost 200,000 visitors and five million page requests.
Oultwood relaunch with a new look
The Oultwood index has been relaunched with a new look and modified navigation.
The new look is to give it a cleaner, more up-to-date look.
Associated with the new look, the site is gradually being converted to XHTML.
This is to allow the site to move towards integrating XML schemas and transactional capabilities.
Three new countries,
Cyprus,
Greece and
Poland
have been added to the local government index section.
The French section has also been extended.
The Internet Atlas
The Internet Atlas (Richard Dinnick - isbn 1 902616 69 3) includes the Oultwood index as one of its ’best 1000 sites on the web’.
The atlas is an excellent reference book as it contains colour images of each site with a brief description.
Colour maps
Originally the maps on the Oultwood local government index were all produced as black and white images.
This was so that the would load quickly even on slow dial-up modem lines.
Because of the huge increase in the use of broadband, some of the maps on the Oultwood local government index have now been converted into colour.
European council index
The Oultwood local government index has now been extended to cover more of Europe.
The Denmark, Netherlands and Norway part of the European section now contains county/province map index pages.
USA council index
The Oultwood local government index has now been extended to cover the USA.
3000 Best Internet Sites
The Oultwood LG index has four references in the book ’3000 best internet sites’
Socitm 2000 conference, Harrogate, Yorkshire, UK
The Oultwood local government index was highlighted during the UK Society of Information Technology Management annual conference at harrogate.
During his entertaining talk on ’drivers on the e-buiness express’,
Roget Annett, Solutions Manager of Merant International told delegates about the usefulness of the Oultwood index.
Merant International limited is well known for its Microfocus Cobol and other quality products.
Over 300 local government it directors attended this important three day event.
Delegates came mainly from the UK but there were a few from Holland and USA.
Internet Magazine’s ’a year of home improvement’
The September 2000 edition of the premier UK web publication
’Internet Magazine’ gives the oultwood lg index a half page review.
The article on page 68 states that ’the site scored highly for it’s excellent content and ease of navigation’.
The good, the bad and the ugly
The UK IT journal ’Computer Weekly’ (29 June 2000 - p114) identified the Oultwood LG index as the way to identify the good, the bad and the ugly local government web sites!
’Labour of love’
The December 1999 edition of the UK ’Internet Monthly’ magazine listed Oultwood in its
’top 10 information sites’.
The magazine rates the site as 4 star ’labour of love’ with:
**** design
**** content