Banner
any day today rss X

News and Comment April 2015

Index: 2009201020112012201320142015201620172018201920202021202220232024

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.

AboutThe 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.

 

Return to the top of this page
Bonkers is a cookie free zone. Not a single one