Planning Alerts

just briefly, before a larger post about the flooding and the political wrangles emerging from it:

If you'd like to be alearted via email about B29 planning applications, sign up for free at planningalerts.com.

This site trawls Birmingham City Council webpages - so you don't have to - and indexes planning applications by postcode, so you can sign up to be alerted when anything happens near you.

A wondrous free idea run by volunteers and hosted by mysociety.org; it counteracts the awful slowness with which local authorities are freeing their data by just getting on and writing screenscrapers (basically, bits of code that suck in web pages and sort out the useful data) instead.

Is Birmingham the new Coventry?

An entirely trivial point: looks like the new way to kill off soap characters is to have them move to Birmingham (though not specifically B29 ;)). The BBC have just offloaded the Trumans from EastEnders by relocating them here...