Read the latest blog on our projects and new developments in areas like security, WordPress and Typo3. The team at Prater Raines write how projects have progressed with challenges that have been faced. We like to keep you informed in technology and security updates.
Our main focus this year was the continued growth of our Lib Dem website platform and by the end of 2004 we reached 175 customers including regions, MPs, MEPs, associated organisations like Liberty Network and ALDC, a portal for returning officers and the London mayoral campaign. This meant we needed our first replacement server which I was proud to tell Tim had 2 CPUs, 80GB of hard disk, and a whole gigabyte of RAM.
WOOOOOOOOSh [said the server]. Nice looking kit. — Tim Prater
2003 was a year of remarkable growth for Prater Raines. We built bespoke website developments for the New Politics Network, the campaign for Votes at 16, the Parliamentary Candidates Association, and events website The Full Effect. But it was the runaway progress of our Liberal Democrat website platform that most proved the business would be lasting and successful.
Tim and I first mooted the idea of working together to build an affordable website platform for Liberal Democrat council groups and individuals in October of 2002. But we’d already known each for other a little while before then.
A recent talk at Symfony Online guilt-tripped me out of the “var_dump() and die()” debugging style once again and back into using XDebug. It’s clearly the right solution to debugging in PHP and Derick is a good friend so I often feel guilty that I’ve fallen out of the habit. Coincidences being what they are, it really came in handy that I’d set it all up again when I had to diagnose a problem with one of our APIs this week. You can’t really var_dump() in a subrequest.
Following this year’s review by the Boundary Commissions for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the next General Election will be fought on new constituencies for the first time since 2010.
Full data isn’t published by the ONS yet. But the Lib Dems use our well-loved online interface to Salesforce, Lighthouse, to manage selection processes for election candidates and need to have the new constituency data to plan for the next GE, in addition to the existing constituencies on which any by-elections before the next GE will still be fought.
In order to import the new data into Salesforce, they naturally turned to Prater Raines for our expertise in political geography and API and database design.
If you work with political geography data and Salesforce, need your own organisation structure mapped, or your online campaign would benefit from enabling supporters to email MPs based on their geographic location, get in touch.
Always good to wake up news to the news that a friend and client has had a major success, and we got that news today!
Huge congratulations to the new MP for Somerton and Frome Sarah Dyke.
Sarah’s campaign website at sarahdyke.uk was based on our Fleet service for the Liberal Democrats. Sites can be put together and launched at speed but with wide ranging functionality, with data flowing directly from website sign-ups, petition signatories and volunteer offers into the Party’s key campaigning database.
Nominet, the public benefit company that operates and protects .UK internet infrastructure, has partnered with The Institute of Coding (IoC). Together, they are launching an ambitious programme at scale to change the course of the UK’s growing digital skills shortage and pull down the barriers many face trying to enter the rapidly-evolving workforce.
Prater Raines have been accredited Nominet Channel Partners since 2007.
Nominet has committed to £12m in funding over three years to develop the Click Start programme with the IoC, led by the University of Bath. There will be opportunities for over 26,000 learners to take part in the initiative – these could be anyone from veterans looking for a career change, to underrepresented groups who are looking for an introduction to entry level tech and digital roles, to young learners looking to start their careers.
When Prater Raines took on its first batch of customers, the only smartphone was a BlackBerry, less than 200,000 UK homes had a broadband Internet connection and Pop Idol’s Gareth Gates and Will Young were dominating the charts.
We’re proud and excited to be celebrating 21 years in business this year and looking forward to many more to come.
At Prater Raines we’ve provided campaigning websites for more than 20 years. Our role as provider of choice to every Liberal Democrat local or regional party in the country means that we’ve registered over a thousand domain names.
During our recent launch of the party’s new federated website platform Fleet we noticed something unusual when we were asked to register some domains containing hyphens for new customers. We were seeing warnings that the sites might not be legitimate.
Every morning at our full-team stand-up meeting we all share what we accomplished yesterday, what we plan to work on today, and the obstacles getting in our way. I wanted a way of tracking what I’ve been working on that was unobtrusive and didn’t require big changes to the way I like to work or huge amounts of time spent on the task of time tracking itself.
The solution I found is the simplest you could come up with but I think there is awesome skill in producing an application that does everything it needs to and nothing more.