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  1. What powers charity websites?

    I wanted to understand what technologies charities are using with their websites. What CMSs do they use to create content and layout the sites? What web technologies are they using - to what extent have the embraced the latest tech on their sites? And how well are they complying with some …

  2. Better horizontal bar charts with plotly

    I often find that horizontal bar charts are a great way of visualising comparisons between different categories. They're easy to understand and make, and provide a really simple way of displaying data.

    But I've found the default way of labelling them often doesn't make sense. Labels for the bars are …

  3. How many charity employees have been furloughed?

    This blog post is a write-up of a twitter thread exploring data available. These are very rough estimates, based on data that's available at the time of writing.

    It's frustratingly difficult to find out how many charities have used the government's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, or how many employees have …

  4. Working with XBRL

    Some notes on the XBRL data format, as I've been working with it this week. I'm working with Power to Change to help them extract data from accounts.

    What's XBRL/iXBRL?

    XBRL standards for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. iXBRL is the same but "inline". They describe a data standard for …

  5. A map of World Cup stadia using wikidata

    Wikidata is an amazing project that aims to turn the unstructured text of Wikipedia into a database of facts and figures that allows you to go beyond just presenting a page about something to using data about it.

    I've been wanting to try out using it, and "SPARQL", the language …

  6. Names shared by genders

    Building the gender classifier I've written about here got me interested in ambiguous names - those that are shared by people of both genders.

    I realised I could use the list of male and female charity trustee names I'd gathered to look into this in a bit more detail. Bearing in …

  7. A name gender classifier

    Something I've needed to do a couple of times is take a long list of names and classify them into male and female. For example, I've looked at lists of people who attended events to see whether they were reaching more men or women - this then helps target future events …

  8. Development version of WordPress on Windows 10

    The problem: I need a local development version of WordPress to help test problems with the live site and also test updates. Previously I’ve used WAMP but that tends to get a bit messy, particularly on Windows 10.

    The solution: use docker to create a container with all the …