So over at the day job we continue to get put through the ringer a little bit. The latest media moment was from City AM (a strange article that had some completely valid points amongst some very strange observations.)

Since I started I have been determined that we would work in the open and that hopefully that kind of transparency would go some way to building bridges with our critics – if nothing else we should be able to get feedback quicker.

So Monday I posted for the first time on the new ONS digital team blog. I have to be honest I was pretty apprehensive about it – can’t remember the last time I was nervous about a blogpost!

With the support of my boss (and further up the chain as well) I decided that we wouldn’t shy away from public criticism and that where appropriate we would link to it. To kick this off I linked to the recent “nation disgrace” piece but hopefully the post itself was otherwise pretty non controversial – just a scene setter for things to come.

The post got a pleasing amount of traffic and some nice comments on Twitter;

ONS digital team launches blog on @wordpressdotcom. So begins the journey of a thousand miles. Well done @jukesie: build momentum from here.

— Simon Dickson (@simond) June 24, 2013

Nice to see @jukesie opening up on the ONS' efforts to get its web act together:-) http://t.co/4gUofEcPGO

— Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) June 24, 2013

great to see the ONS Digital Publishing team unveil their blog http://t.co/fS7CDKajx0 (via @jukesie & @lesteph)

— James Stewart (@jystewart) June 25, 2013

I fully intend to use the blog to ‘show our workings’ and to think out loud. I have posts lined up about our work to improve search, navigation and accessibility as well as intros from our social media and content design teams.

The blog itself is just a WordPress.com blog with the ‘premium’ option purchased (I just bought that on my PayPal – didn’t even claim it – thats how determined I was!). The theme is a very lightly customised version of Academica that has some issues – thats what happens when I try and get my hands dirty 🙂 At some point I’d like to move it on to a better theme and get someone to sort the CSS properly but I decided getting it out was more important than getting it perfect.

I also managed to reclaim the @ONSdigital Twitter account from a recruitment agency who used it for an earlier campaign so I’ll be using that to engage on Twitter a bit – give a little separation between my usual witterings and work specific babble!