Book launch
My book has just come out, Web Application Development with R using Shiny. It’s an introduction to the marvellous Shiny from the wonderful people at RStudio. Although the online documentation for Shiny does cover most of the things you might want to do with it the people who approached me about writing the book thought that having a more comprehensive guide with some worked examples would be useful. And I was inclined to agree.
Patient Opinion data made easy with R
As you may or may not be aware, I recently helped on the data side of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust’s feedback website which lives here. Part of this work was collecting the data we receive from the Trust-wide patient survey and bringing it in with other sources of feedback, including stories from our friends over at Patient Opinion. For a long time I’ve queried their data using their API (documentation is here) and fiddled around with it a bit, but my XML was never quite up to doing a proper extract and getting the data into the same structure as the rest of our patient experience data.
Some examples of Shiny with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery
It’s becoming rather Shiny-centric, this blog, I know, but I just put some little demos about how to use Shiny with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery, just some toy examples with links to source, up on the website. So if you’re interested in Shiny go have a look. Each has a link to the interactive version and the source. Do note that there are easier/ better ways of doing some of these things (row highlighting can be done in CSS rather than jQuery, e.
Shiny widget demo
For those of you using the brilliant Shiny package in R, I’ve built a little toy to help you learn/ remember the main widget types and the type of values they return. Code is here and it’s running on my Shiny Server here. Enjoy/ find useful!
Citrix on Ubuntu 12.04
One for Linux users forced to use Citrix to log in to their corporate email, such as myself. I’d long given up trying to get Citrix to work on Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop, but a recent success with 13.04 on my main computer led me to have another go. I followed the instructions here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CitrixICAClientHowTo, got some weird error message, followed the instructions here http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=306353&tstart=0 and BOOM, I was in.
What’s up with chrisbeeley.net?
I’ve had my own server for a little while now, with a very scabby and unattractive webpage on it, some Java I haven’t got round to turning into an applet, a couple of random Shiny apps, and that’s about it. I’m very busy at the moment writing a book so I’m afraid I haven’t really had time to work on any of these side projects. I have, however, done loads of cool things with the actual server, so I thought I might mention these.
Department for redundancy department results of staff survey questionnaire
I’ve just received the following in a local newsletter. It’s reasonably clear, so it passes the first test, but really the decimal places are redundant, as are the frequency counts. Much nicer in a bar chart, of course: <pre class="brush: r; title: ; notranslate" title=""> barplot(c(23.6, 24.2, 26.4, 20.2, 6.2), names.arg = c("Not at all", "Not entirely", "Ambivalent", "Somewhat", "Very"), col = heat.colors(5), ylab="%", main = "Happiness with new PDPR procedure")
Shiny application in a morning
Sort of apropos of nothing, really, this, but I was doing some research with some colleagues the other day and to help out I built a shiny application in a morning. Munging the data etc. took ages as it always does but once I actually had everything clean and tidy and working laying an interface on top was the easy bit. What a fantastic tool it really is, completely changed the way we work with data now we can just throw stuff on the internet and let people play around just in the morning.
Change we need to see in Government and public service IT
There’s a lot of material here, including a 22 minute talk, but if you’re even remotely interested in IT in government and public services then please have a look here (you can get all three by clicking through, but I’ve extracted each link for you). gov.uk a truly open platform The unacceptable in government IT Chris Chant on the future
It’s alive!
Well, it finally launched today, the patient feedback website that we created as part of the Patient Feedback Challenge. The evaluation section was part of a partnership with the Involvement Centre of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust and the web design agency Numiko to build a website which can help us to collect feedback data, summarise and report on it and share the actions and learning which have resulted. Go have a look.