gilest.org

The dot becomes a bullet
new gov stuff to be taken with

(16 January 2026)

There’s a new GDS spin-off called GOV.UK AI Studio. This week, the team unveiled a fresh new blog-not-blog (it’s just referred to as ‘Updates from the studio’). It has some interesting features:

• It’s hosted at alphagov.github.io, ie the ancient ‘alphagov’ GitHub account that’s been around since the early days. But not used for this purpose before, to my knowledge.
• The team are doing a really good job of ‘showing the thing’. They’ve kept the writing simple and high level, not digging down into the technical weeds. Lots of helpful screenshots, with captions, making clear what’s going on. This is really nice stuff.
• The govgreen dot has now become a bullet point, but is not present in the header between the GOV and the UK.

I’m very taken with this, and happy to see GDS going back to its roots, openness-wise. I hope there’s more of this to come.

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A billion years ago in internet time, I saved links to del.icio.us, and it was great. I often referred to them, searched them, made use of them. Then I moved to Raindrop.io for bookmarking, and I’m still using it, but I’ve noticed my own behaviour change: I’m not using the saved bookmarks the way I used to.

What’s more, my motivations have changed. These days, I care a lot more about having a searchable copy of the pages I want to save. Raindrop will do that, if I cough up for a Pro account, but I’m not sure. The older I get, the more I see the value of local storage, of making my own archives for my own purposes. As Lydie would say: “Download everything. Never trust the cloud.”

This week I went down a small rabbit hole, looking at options. There are Mac apps like EagleFiler, DevonThink and even good old Yojimbo – all of these bring back memories of the years I spent earning a crust writing about Mac software. Pretty sure I wrote reviews of all of those at one point or another. They’re all excellent tools, with excellent features. But after installing all of them, and trying them out, I’m still not sure that one of them is the answer. Perhaps there’s another answer.

I’ve mentioned SingleFile before, because it’s a great tool: a browser extension that saves any web page you’re looking at as a single file, images and all. I like its simplicity. But searching the files it creates - I’ve got a few dozen of them now - isn’t great. Spotlight doesn’t do a very good job. (Maybe Spotlight is the problem?)

Anyway. I have no answers or insights, only questions. A topic to ponder and revisit, perhaps, when insights emerge.

~

The links. I dump them:

• A page from the planning gang about working in the open
• A working in the open update from Wales, by Monika Swiatek: How and why it matters for public services in Wales
• Interface failure is leadership failure by m’colleague Vero Jermolina
• James made some great little inspirational posters
• The work of Stanko Tadić, including How to draw a Space Invader and Letters from Sarajevo

~

Pics from recent like:

giles (at) gilest.org

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