Yearly Archives: 2010

Wonderful new features for PlanningAlerts

By Henare Degan | Published: December 6, 2010

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added some wonderful new features to PlanningAlerts which are the start of something big. Until now, the focus of PlanningAlerts has been squarely and clearly about notifying you of new development applications in your area. That notification happens via email. We’ve added two new big features which allow […]

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Who is the mysterious filtering software provider?

By Matthew Landauer | Published: November 24, 2010

In our last post we brought to attention the strange case of one of our project websites openaustralia.org being blocked from access by employees of the department of Customs. To our surprise this was then picked up by Fairfax media and even raised by Mia Garlick, Assistant Secretary, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital […]

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Blog stopped at customs in bizarre case of mistaken identity

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 28, 2010

In a bizarre case of mistaken identity the department of Customs and Border Protection appear to think that OpenAustralia.org‘s republishing of Federal parliamentary discussions constitutes a blog. Last week we were told by a person who works for the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service that OpenAustralia.org was blocked by their IT department’s security policy. […]

Posted in OpenAustralia.org | 15 Responses

Clock has run out on Victorian election monitoring

By Henare Degan | Published: October 25, 2010

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 […]

Posted in Development, ElectionLeaflets.org.au | Tagged , , , | 1 Response

A new way of seeing

By Matthew Landauer | Published: July 16, 2010

Today, we’re happy to announce a new way of seeing planning applications from PlanningAlerts.org.au for the iPhone 3GS and Android phones. It uses an augmented reality application called Layar to display recent planning applications in real time over a live image of what your phone is pointed at. To install follow this link on your […]

Posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | 6 Responses

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

By Matthew Landauer | Published: June 27, 2010

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. […]

Posted in Development, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , | 15 Responses

Embed a PlanningAlerts Google Map in your blog

By Henare Degan | Published: June 17, 2010

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 […]

Posted in Development, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , | 1 Response

Search engines are how people find out about stuff

By Matthew Landauer | Published: May 11, 2010

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

By Matthew Landauer | Published: May 7, 2010

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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Blog definitely not forgotten

By Matthew Landauer | Published: May 6, 2010

It’s been way too long since I’ve written anything on this blog, which is very poor. Time to turn that around. There’s lots to talk about. Because I haven’t written anything in ages I don’t really know where to start. Hmmm…

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