Having looked at all the all the new localgov site launches since April - Phil Rumens said he was looking for a way to find beta/test sites. Now the localgov speedy script takes a list of existing sites, and tests them, but it’s not a huge leap to change the code search the sites we are looking at for signs of “beta”, or “new website”, so I created a new script looksy.py that did that.
It turns out that’s not a very good way of finding a new site - after a few tweaks I found beta darlington.gov.uk so you could say that is the only public beta at the moment.
Undeterred I’ve create a new script guessy.py that just sees if there is anything at the end of a domain name. (i.e. takes darlington.gov.uk and looks for beta.darlington.gov.uk or new.darlington.gov.uk). and that works much better - I now have 14 local government beta or new sites. Now just because these sites say beta / new doesn’t mean they are/aren’t launched in some form (hence all these links are rel=nofollow)
Beta Sites:
Birmingham http://beta.birmingham.gov.uk
![birmingham_desktop](/images/2014/06/birmingham_desktop.jpg)
![birmingham_mobile](/images/2014/06/birmingham_mobile.jpg)
Cheshire east http://beta.cheshireeast.gov.uk
![cheshire east_desktop](/images/2014/06/cheshire-east_desktop.jpg)
![cheshire east_mobile](/images/2014/06/cheshire-east_mobile.jpg)
Darlington http://beta.darlington.gov.uk
![darlington_desktop](/images/2014/06/darlington_desktop.jpg)
![darlington_mobile](/images/2014/06/darlington_mobile.jpg)
Devon http://beta.devon.gov.uk
![devon_desktop](/images/2014/06/devon_desktop.jpg)
![devon_mobile](/images/2014/06/devon_mobile.jpg)
Gwynedd http://beta.gwynedd.gov.uk
![gwynedd_desktop](/images/2014/06/gwynedd_desktop.jpg)
![gwynedd_mobile](/images/2014/06/gwynedd_mobile.jpg)
Hounslow http://beta.hounslow.gov.uk
![honslow_desktop](/images/2014/06/honslow_desktop.jpg)
![honslow_mobile](/images/2014/06/honslow_mobile.jpg)
Wandsworth http://beta.wandsworth.gov.uk
![wandsworth_desktop](/images/2014/06/wandsworth_desktop.jpg)
![wandsworth_mobile](/images/2014/06/wandsworth_mobile.jpg)
South Gloucestershire http://beta.southglos.gov.uk
![southglos_desktop](/images/2014/06/southglos_desktop.jpg)
![southglos_mobile](/images/2014/06/southglos_mobile.jpg)
Barnsley http://new.barnsley.gov.uk
![barnsley_desktop](/images/2014/06/barnsley_desktop.jpg)
![barnsley_mobile](/images/2014/06/barnsley_mobile.jpg)
Brighton Hove http://new.brighton-hove.gov.uk
![brighton-hove_desktop](/images/2014/06/brighton-hove_desktop.jpg)
![brighton-hove_mobile](/images/2014/06/brighton-hove_mobile.jpg)
East Devon http://new.eastdevon.gov.uk
![eastdevon_desktop](/images/2014/06/eastdevon_desktop.jpg)
![eastdevon_mobile](/images/2014/06/eastdevon_mobile.jpg)
Lancashire http://new.lancashire.gov.uk
![lancashire_desktop](/images/2014/06/lancashire_desktop.jpg)
![lancashire_mobile](/images/2014/06/lancashire_mobile.jpg)
Shropshire http://new.shropshire.gov.uk
![shropshire_desktop](/images/2014/06/shropshire_desktop.jpg)
![shropshire_mobile](/images/2014/06/shropshire_mobile.jpg)
Telford http://new.telford.gov.uk
![telform_desktop](/images/2014/06/telform_desktop.jpg)
![telform_mobile](/images/2014/06/telform_mobile.jpg)
Many of these sites are in various states of development, some look like default installations of the CMS (Wandsworth) while I know others actually do provide live services (for example in Shropshire and Lancashire)
_if your website is on this list and you want it taking off - drop me an email and i will remove it (but you probably want better security on something you don’t want people to see) _
Open source everything: At Jumoo, we open source everything, so even though the python script is a bit of an abomination, you can go to github and see for yourself what we have done to find these sites.