Let the blog see the rabbit...

I've had a pretty good day today - I've got quite a lot done. It's always a satisfying feeling when I manage to empty the Today section in Things.

Killing two birds with one stone, I added all the letters from local MPs that have been cluttering up my desk for the last few weeks to the SAEN and SEEFoE websites. I also went down to the airport and took some photos, one of which I then used in the design for a leaflet SAEN will be distributing when the second phase of the JAAP consultation finally gets started. Given current economic situation and the large number of redundancies at the airport following the collapse of Flightline, though, there has to be some doubt about whether Eddie Stobart will want to go ahead with the airport expansion plans - particularly as the airport would then cost them an extra £5 million.

I was particularly pleased with the WordPress plugin I wrote this evening for the Marine Reserves website. EDM 337 is supportive of the campaign's aims and I wanted to show on the website how many MPs have signed it. In the typical way that the Government does everything IT-related badly, there's no nice RSS feed of this information, so I have to scrape it from the EDM page directly. In order to make it more efficient, I cache the resulting value and only fetch it again if it's been more than 12 hours since I last got it. The information is then stored in the Wordpress database. Not bad for the first plugin I've ever written, I reckon! You can download it if you want, not that it's likely to be much use to you. :-)

Following the realisation that I only made two blog entries during the whole of 2008, I resolved to do better this year and when I read that a band of SUCS-related ne'er-do-wells are having a "Blog-a-Week" competition, I thought I might as well give it a go. Willwel is keeping track of everyone's posts on this calendar. So that's another thing achieved - my second Blog-a-Week!