Maybe NYC could start with a simple URL

It has not been my experience that government RFPs contain bullet points like "URLs should be non-redundant" and "In general, the software should not suck." No, instead they're like "The website shall make specific steps to be Y2K compliant as outlined in the Council of American Governors Strategy Memorandum On Y2K Compliance, edition 2.1A revised."

P.S. Find the Y2K compliance code. It doesn't work, but working is not the reason they needed Y2K compliance code in the first place -- it is just another checkbox to fill.

taylorbuley2• 15 years ago

My guess is that "html" really means "folder full of static stuff," and each project needs to be in it's own subdirectory called "home." Confusingly, Apache or whatever might be config'ed to read directories indexes from home.shtml.

The first html is the generic static assets folder, and the second is the local projects' folder full of assets.

Poor developers never had a chance.

www.nyc.gov/html/housinginfo/html/home/home.shtml

www.nyc.gov/html/dob/html/home/home.shtml

www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml

etc.

misterbee2• 15 years ago

http://www.nyc.gov/html/housinginfo works. http://www.nyc.gov/housinginfo redirects to http://www.nyc.gov/html/housinginfoinfo which gives a 404 error, that's probably a typo bug.

http://www.nyc.gov/dob 404s, but http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob works, so that ought to be fixed.

http://www.nyc.gov/planyc2030 works.

notJim2• 15 years ago

I used to work for a company that made custom web applications, occasionally for the government (though more often, not.) This problem is actually a pretty tough one.

The way it usually works is the government agency drafts a request for proposal which has a list of features and other miscellaneous, sometimes random requirements. The thing is, who at the government would think to request friendly or short URLs? They are not web developers. They are probably older than 40, and not really up on all this social media stuff.

Now, some firms that submit proposals are of a high-enough quality that they would know that friendly and/or short urls are a part of modern web best practices. But again, how does the government agency know that seeing that is a good sign?

So sometimes, the agency realizes it doesn't know anything about technology and hires a company who does to develop the RFP. Except, then you're back at the same problem: how does the government agency know how to choose a company that will write a good spec?

iuygthn3• 15 years ago

>They are probably older than 40

Yep it's tough being over 40 - we don't really understand this web stuff. I mean we invented it all 20years ago, we wrote the first browsers and the first servers, we wrote the first pages - but since we don't spend all our time following #britney or end every sentence with LOL we obviously can't understand it.

Now you kids get off my (virtual) lawn

russell• 15 years ago

RFPs are written by people you never met, were negotiated by people you barely know. Coding standards likewise. If you do something smart, the auditor or whomever will piss on your boss, who will kindly (or not so) tell you to quit making his life so difficult and knock it off. You will learn and scratch your creative itch.

I worked in that environment, but I could talk to the govt. guy in charge and his minion was a pretty good guy. So long as we followed the RFP and the law, we could tweak the implementation. I was a consultant so anytime I felt down, I picked up my bank statement and let its glow sooth me.

smackfu• 15 years ago

Is it really that big a deal? They do have a short home page URL to advertise that redirects to this page, and everyone else really just uses bookmarks.

yoshiks• 15 years ago

Redundancy is important in simplicity discussion, they want to say.

hansef• 15 years ago

This is what you get when you spend millions of dollars on an enterprise CMS + integration once every 8 years or so.

GBond• 15 years ago

Yes. Many of the NYC.gov websites are run on a "enterprise CMS" that imposes long URLs (name of the CMS starts with an "I"... ends with a "woven").

I understand that the purpose of this submission was to poke fun at NYC gov't and their seemingly inability to adapt to current-day tech standards. In a lot of cases this is valid criticism. However, for the past few year, nyc has made some pretty cool initiatives to make data and services it support more open and available. Someone else mentioned the nyc data feeds which is a good example. There are a bunch of twitter accounts (like @311nyc) that are actually useful. Another cool use of data is: http://gis.nyc.gov/doitt/nycitymap/ (geo map search, great for looking up official city building info).

Even with some flaws (and many inefficiencies), we should commend NYC for not treating tech only as "necessary overhead" as most other cities do. IMO, NYC is second only to SanFran when it comes to being progressive on tech (SanFran has a policy to look OOS first for any new project which is great).

BTW, I do not work for the city but I interact with many agency IT groups via work.

wallflower• 15 years ago

To be fair to NYC, they were enlightened enough to let developers compete to build apps on city databases.

http://www.nycbigapps.com/

cloudwalking• 15 years ago

That's really cool. Someone should make a game to compete with your neighbors for lowest power/gas/water usage... Maybe have a Friends Leaderboard on fbook.

phlux• 15 years ago

Why don't we have a game where elected officials actually compete to fulfil campaign promises, lower spending, increase efficiency, hold people accountable.

That sounds fun! We can vote for the officials that do best!

vizvizviz2• 15 years ago

They also advertise this fact publicly on the subway cars!

I hope this is the start of a larger trend for municipal databases. Cities could benefit tremendously by allowing private developers to work with their data and create apps that people actually want to use.

sudonim• 15 years ago

Im involved in NYC BigApps (ChallengePost powers it). As far as I know, BigApps is not being advertised on subway cars.

You may be thinking of the MTA's ad "Our apps our whiz kid certified" http://ron.gejman.com/blog/2010/12/20/our-app-are-whiz-kid-c...

misterbee2• 15 years ago

Something like http://www.nyc.gov/simplicity, maybe?

Oh, that works.

Let's try to be constructive here.

davidhollander• 15 years ago

Second news highlight on linked page:

>New York City and Microsoft Partner to Modernize City's IT Infrastructure - Mayor Bloomberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announce first of its kind partnership to keep New York City at the cutting edge of technological innovation while saving taxpayer dollars.

Long term licensing of proprietary software somehow does not seem like the best way to save tax payer dollars. I wonder how many thousands of IT departments and millions of computers exist across federal, state, and local levels? It seems likely that either the Department of Energy, NSA, or DoD already maintains their own Linux or BSD distribution that could be used to run open office on every government computer in the country for free. Even if you are a Windows fan, it seems hard to justify spending tax dollars on that many licenses for government use.

tehmasp• 15 years ago

http://www.nyc.gov/simplicity works! Are we trying to make HN like digg or something? maybe a little restraint could help.

"Look! That Hacker picked his nose!"

Ben_Dean• 15 years ago

haha. double home is funny.

Maybe NYC could start with a simple URL

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