The Cosmonaut

I am super-happy to share this news about Planetaki: we already implemented a feature to embed a planet in whatever website you want. Ain’t that cool or what?

If you are a Planetaki user and want to try it out, experiment a bit or just do some good to your website readers, try embedding this ultra-tiny piece of code inside your html:

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://www.planetaki.com/javiercanada.js”></script>

Make sure you change the “javiercanada” piece for your planet slug or it will be my planet showing up on your own house :)

The City of Madrid’s website (munimadrid.es) has been ranked the most usable of all municipal governance websites in the world in a study commissioned by United Nations and conducted by Rutgers University. Madrid also ranks very high in other categories, being the 5th best overall.

This makes me very proud since I lead the team who made that possible. I guess I cannot disclose much of the information regarding the project, but I want to congratulate and thank the team who worked really hard to make it possible. We weren’t expecting such success.

Here is the press release and a link to a United Nations page with the full report.

Here is the overall ranking:

This is the detail on the usability category:

This is the paragraph where Madrid’s website is mentioned as one of the best practices all over the world:

Working for the public administration is always dificult. There are many interests and stakeholders which sometimes conflict among themselves and you feel in the middle having to come up with something that compromises all parts and is also what you think it’s best for users. I don’t recall it as an easy project.

Besides, as a professional you have to deliver a plus when working in such projects. Why? For two main reasons:

1. You are being paid with everybody’s money
2. Your users are the Citizens. You work for the public good.

I remember recalling these principles when things used to get tough. It was our big motivation. Now I see it was worth the sacrifice.

I was very happy to see Planetaki on PC Actual, one of the main computer magazines in Spain. It’s on a report about web apps made here.

Here is a picture of the article, taken by Denegro:

It’s so cool to share these three pages with Unvlog and iwannagothere, two projects we admire, use and love.