7 April - The Greens get my vote
Bexley is home to three parliamentary constituencies so there should be
at least a dozen candidate websites to peruse and if the Lib Dems come out of
hibernation maybe even more. Some of those websites can be quite hard to find so
they have been added to the Bonkers’ main menu (under Politics) and a few of the
candidates’ leaflets are available from the
Politics Index page.
The Bonkers
website is hand coded which was a possibly silly decision taken six years ago but it
allows total flexibility and there is no going back now.
My interest in web code extends to looking under the bonnet
of other sites which as a strange obsession ranks only a little worse than
watching Anna Firth take on a variety of anonymous Twitter adversaries keen to
blame her for all the ills of Bexley council. I suspect she has worked out for
herself by now they are a political breed apart - but back to those political websites.
My first experience with a desktop computer was writing a suite of programs that
calculated required staffing levels in my employer’s London office and another
that swapped accounting information with a trading partner in New York; all on a
machine with 27KB (27,648) bytes of memory. Squeezing quarts into pint pots
is a habit that lingers on so when a month of Bonkers blogs started creeping towards 4MB (four
million bytes) I found it worrying. Hence the new facility which downloads only a
single blog when more is not required.
But no one else is very interested in keeping downloads as small as possible.
The front page of
Anna Firth’s website is 5,119,172 bytes.
James Brokenshire’s
is slightly bigger but
David Evennett’s campaign site is only a 1,246,416 byte
download. Impressive! His ‘My Local Plan’ page is even smaller.
For Labour, Teresa Pearce gets by on a mere two and a half million bytes,
Stefano Borella barely breaks the two million barrier but
Ibby Mehmet
(Old Bexley & Sidcup) will take you over 3MB for a totally contentless front page. A spectacular achievement!
It's UKIP which take the biscuit though. Their front page tips over the eleven
million bytes mark and
each candidate adds another four!
Don’t go there on a PAYG phone.
Outclassing them all on a data to content ratio are
the Greens
putting their Eco friendly message into practice with a full description of
three candidates in only 439,179 bytes. Clear winners for me. Shame about their policies.