Tuesday 7 February 2017

Site is up

A good start today at MPdB.org.uk.
Two person entries so far, May and Abbott.
Next targets: Corbyn, Thornberry, McDonnell, Boris, David Davis, Hammond, Soubry, Rees-Mogg.

Major thanks to Stefan Mischook and his WEB DESIGN Start Here for the templates. 50p on Amazon.

Sunday 5 February 2017

Logo

We need a logo. Here's the first suggestion, using an image of the Lego HofC released last year.

or,
I'll take a snap next time I'm in town and work on that.

Or,


Design considerations

The original design was pre- (public) internet and intended as a stand-alone PC desktop application for use by charities to identify UK MPs and MEPs who might be interested in their (the charities') spheres of activity. It included the availability of physical addresses for written mail campaigns. Devolution of decisions to regional governments had not then been conceived.

It has already been noted that only current players are relevant and so historical representation and the forthcoming constituency boundary changes are not needed.

The new version is intended for our personal interest and pleasure to deliver basic data on every UK MP with, perhaps a link to an page of additional information on those of  particular, subjective interest.

It is likely that there will not be UK MEPs soon. There are Scottish and Welsh and NI assemblies, but we might not bother with those (thought that possibility should be catered for). It is unlikely that all the Lords will be recorded, but some might.

Consideration should be given to recording details of journalists and maybe other media folk.

It is thought unlikely that non-UK politicians will be considered.

Let's look at  the details we might find interesting:

MP
Name
Age
School
University
Work
Party
Personal web site
Constituency
Date first elected (ignoring any gaps in MP-ship - too difficult to capture)
Our page.

Constituency
Location
Result details (maybe margin of victory, 2nd party, 3rd party)

Offices
Cabinet, shadow cabinet etc.
Select committees
Party offices

Other
Interests
Affiliations

Here's the entity relationship diagram from the 1990 design,



Database design and development

The good old Open University supplied my theoretical dB training.

The best book on relational database analysis and design remains, I am sure, although I have not looked lately, Richard Veryard's Pragmatic Data Analysis, now out of print and selling for a surprising from £35 on Amazon.

As regards development, I am rather in the dark. I have often thought that it would be good to build a Mondrian database (that would be PMdB, rather than MPdB) and so have bought a number of PHP and SQL primers in the past, but gave them to Greenwich's Oxfam bookshop in the last library clearout. This time, I'm starting with Larry Ullman's PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites.
Other contenders are:

Later that day - I have picked up four 1-penny (or a little more) second hand books from Amazon and will list any that prove worthwhile.




Intro

Nearly 27 years ago my wife's MSc project was a database of UK MPs recording their areas of interest, intended to aid charities in their lobbying activities. How prescient.
Nowadays we have a keen interest in UK politics and often look up details of MPs.
So how much fun would it be to run our own online database?

33 years ago I retrained from a Barclays (Bank Trust Company) tax adviser
to a programmer (many thanks to BOC and to the govt. at the time for the six-month TOPS retraining course). I worked on mainframes until retirement, but have been building static web sites since 2000.

The plan is to learn how to build an online database of UK MPs.

This will test my coding and new-learning capabilities to the full, and may be abandoned if it's too much like hard work, but it's worth a try.


One thing to note, the database is only intended to supply information on the current MPs, so the proposed boundary changes for the 2020 election will not cause conversion headaches - I'll just dump the old version and reconfigure on the new boundaries.