At first it seems to make sense to remove these products. After all, businesses could suffer adverse effects from a safe product continiung to be included on a website intended to show products identified as unsafe. However, Recalled Products is just as much a register of safe products as unsafe. We believe that keeping information about safe products in circulation is as important as for unsafe products. Why?

Up-to-date representation reduces confusion over a product’s current status. Consumers cannot be sure of a product’s status if it is eliminated from the Recalled Products site (and by logical extension from all and any sites carrying recall information). Thus we prefer to update the product entry with an appropriate message in order to provide a clear and current service. One of the first items you’ll see on such pages is a box-out clearly stating that a product is removed along with RAPEX’s stated reason for removal.

We believe that responsible businesses should welcome this approach as it shows that the product is no longer considered a risk and can be used safely. A quick internet search reveals websites that continue to list products as recalled long after their reclassification as safe. We believe that it is actually beneficial to companies that the Recalled Products website gives the correct status of the product.

To be fair, in all the dealings we’ve had with such companies to date, this policy has been accepted once pointed out. Our definitive policy can be seen on the recalled products website.

Our supplier has worked to replace the faulty equipment and bring our services back online.  This work was completed at around 2.15pm this afternoon.  There are however a few outstanding issues with some of our websites:

• We have taken the decision to temporarily suspend new registrations on StayPrivate.org for a few hours to ensure that the server is stable and no problems occur.
• Recalled Product alert emails that should have been sent this morning have not been sent.  We will schedule these to be sent later today.

This blog and the CF Labs twitter account will be updated when the items above are resolved. We will be monitoring situation for the next few hours to ensure everything is running normally and will publish a more detailed post later in the week once we’ve had a chance to discuss the cause with our supplier.

We apologise for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.

Update (18:27): We are now accepting new registrations on StayPrivate.org.

Update 2 (21:26): This morning’s recall alerts have now been sent.

The biggest change you’ll notice is the design of the site. It’s more of an evolution of the design than a brand new look – we’ve kept the same structure, but given it a bit more of a “CF Labs” style (similar to StayPrivate.org and Community Post Offices).

We’ve increased the width of the site which has allowed us to improve the layout of the product recall notices. We’ll be making better use of this extra space on other parts of the site over the coming months.

We’ve also spent some time working on the recall statistics we generate – in some cases, we felt they weren’t particularly clear. For example, the chart showing the top dangers in recall notices included “chemical” near the top, but further down it also included “chemical and damage to sight”, “chemical and drowning” and “injuries, choking and chemical”.

This meant that some of the figures weren’t fully representative of the real numbers. As a result, we’ve completely rebuilt the statistics engine to take account of this kind of thing. This has also enabled us to output the data in CSV and JSON formats for those that want it. As always, these statistics are available under the Open Government Licence.

The other big change we’ve made is to the scraper we use to import recall notices from the European Union RAPEX system. Occasionally odd characters crept onto the notices where certain special characters hadn’t been encoded properly by the source. We’ve updated the scraper so it handles this encoding on their behalf prior to importing to reduce the likelyhood of this happening in future.  To improve the existing data on the site, we’ve gone back and re-imported the latest 300 recalls (everything from January 2011 and most of December 2010).

Occasionally RAPEX make changes to notices that have been published such as fixing errors, adding additional information or removing notices that have been cancelled. While we were picking up and replicating these changes before, our updated scraper allows us to detect these in much greater detail.

To ensure users can see an accurate history of each recall notice, we’ve now included a column on the notice’s page that will list any changes made. Where a text change has taken place, we’ll include the original text for comparison. You can see an example of this on one of the recalls we re-imported yesterday.

We’ve got more improvements planned over the next few months, so keep an eye out for updates on this blog.

Consumer Focus Corporate Website

In October we announced that we had taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. One of our first jobs was to transfer the site from the ASP.NET content management system provided by the original developers to WordPress. This involved converting the existing design to WordPress templates, bringing over all the content and training the staff involved in updating the site. With everything completed we launched the “new” site in late November.

Since then we’ve been working on the second phase of work – a complete content restructure and update to make content easier to find across Consumer Focus’ target audiences. This, together with several tweaks to the look and feel of the site (designed to take advantage of some of the features available in WordPress), will be completed in the next few weeks.

Both phases have been a huge undertaking, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible to make changes in the future, hence the switch to WordPress. One of the advantages of the WordPress platform is that it is so easy to extend. Where we need to add in new functionality, it is likely a plugin already exists to do the job. If it doesn’t, creating one is fairly straightforward.

For those that are interested in some of the technical aspects- the site now uses WordPress MU on a LAMP platform. We control all the code through our SVN repositories and deploy to the servers using Capistrano. This is almost identical to the way in which we manage our other projects such as this site and Recalled Products.

Guidelines for public sector websites

As some of you may be aware, the Central Office of Information (COI) publishes a set of guidelines for UK public sector websites. We’ve spent a fair amount of time working out what we need to do to reach compliance and we’ll be making the necessary adaptations to all Consumer Focus and Labs websites over the coming months.

Does Directgov Deliver?

In December we launched ‘Does Directgov Deliver?‘, Consumer Focus’s first report to allow comments directly from members of the public by way of consultative website. The report itself was produced by the Public & Community Services Team within Consumer Focus and looks at whether Directgov delivers on its promise to ‘provide information and online services for the public all in one place’. We wanted to make it easy to comment on each part of the report, so WordPress was the obvious choice. We adapted the Commentariat theme developed by the BIS innovation team to power the website.

If you want to comment on the report, head over to the website. Comments will be closing soon but the website will remain online. Sign up to the mailing list on the website (powered by Google Groups) to be kept up-to-date on Consumer Focus’s work on Directgov.

We are now looking at how we can improve the process of collecting comments on our reports, so keep an eye out for future experiments like this.

Recalled Products

As you may have noticed, in December we turned on another set of features on the Recalled Products website. We now pull in photos and related documents for products when they are available. We’re also experimenting with producing some statistics on the number of recalls we import every week, what categories they are in and what the dangers are. Let us know what you think of these and how we can improve them.

If you are a registered user, you don’t need to do anything at your end, but email alerts and RSS feeds will reflect the name change.  The old domain should redirect all requests automatically.

Categorisation
This was a big request from the early users of the website and something we wanted to bring in as soon as we could. We currently have over 380 recalls stored in the database, and each week this grows by around 40. This means there are over 38 pages of notices to go through and leads to some quite hefty emails going out. As it stands, people who sign up get sent every recall we find – not everyone is interested in angle grinders or laser pointers.

Today’s website brings in full categorisation. You can now browse through recalls for a particular category, for example clothing, motor cars, or gas appliances. When you search for an item, this can be filtered by category. Each category comes with its own RSS feed so you can subscribe to the updates that interest you. Also, it’s now possible to filter the email alerts you receive. Just select the category from the options on the sign up form. For example, if you just want to be notified about toys, then that is all we will send you.

To give you some idea of the state of the database – toys & other children’s equipment make up just under a third of the database, and clothing & fashion items take up about 25% of the website.

Improved Import Script
We’ve also made a few changes to the way the import script works. This allows us to detect when items are removed from the EC website. While we do not follow their practice of removing them from the site, we will be marking with them a ‘removed’ tag.

Other Tweaks
There are a few other tweaks around the website, such as the addition of pagination to searches, increasing the number of items in the RSS feeds and adding social media sharing buttons to the recall item pages. Hopefully these will help make the site easier and more useful to use.

Open Sourced Code
Finally, we’ve now open sourced the code for the website. This means that you can download the code to power your own projects. This is an important step for us and marks the first piece of work to be open sourced.

To get the code, just pop along to our Github repository. If you use the code, let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it!

As always, we appreciate all comments, so please take a look at the updated site and let us know what you think.

We’ve been talking for a while about the first project that we’ve been building, and today we’re pleased to be able to switch on the Product Recalls website.

The issue of product recalls is a tricky one.  Some companies publish notices in the national newspapers or display a poster in their shop window. Some of these notices are published on the Trading Standards Institute website; others are published on the European Commission Consumer Affairs site.  However, without checking these sources regularly, there is no easy way of discovering if something you have bought has been recalled.

The website aims to solve this problem.  It collects UK and European product recall notices from the European Commission and publishes them via RSS and email.  You can sign up for weekly or monthly email alerts, search the database of recalls for keywords (such as product or brand name), and subscribe to them through your RSS reader.

We’ve tried to build the site so that recalled products can easily be found in existing search engines – an issue not considered by some of the other solutions.

The site is in its first iteration, so we will be looking at how we can improve the offering over the next few months.  In the mean time, take a look at the site and let us know any comments and suggestions you have.

Late last week, we released an early beta version of the site to a number of people within Consumer Focus, and those signed up to our mailing list. Since then, we’ve gathered some feedback, and are making some final few tweaks before launching the site as a public beta.  Once these little bits are done, and we’ve solved some last minute logistical issues, we’ll let you know.

Keep your eyes peeled ;-)