SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

The process of optimising your website to get more organic or un-paid traffic from the search engine results page.

As a term, SEO is almost now a generic way to talk about ‘making it appear in searches at the top’.  The challenge with this is that it’s a constant cat and mouse game as Google, Bing, Jeeves, etc don’t publish how they rank sites explicitly, so there is an entire industry trying to reverse engineer it and sell the techniques. 

There are things website teams should always do, and keep doing, but SEO needs to be thought about constantly rather than ‘set and forget’ – though it’s also correct that too many changes, or the wrong ones, could have a detrimental effect on a website’s position in search engine results.

DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service)

DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, is a malicious cyberattack in which multiple compromised computers, known as “bots” or “zombies,” flood a target system or website with a massive volume of traffic. The goal is to overwhelm the target’s resources, such as servers or network bandwidth, rendering it inaccessible to legitimate users.

DDoS attacks typically fall into three categories:

  1. Volume-Based Attacks: These flood the target with a high volume of traffic, often using botnets, to exhaust network resources.
  2. Protocol-Based Attacks: These exploit vulnerabilities in network protocols, consuming server resources and making the service unresponsive.
  3. Application Layer Attacks: These target the application itself, overwhelming it with malicious requests, often difficult to differentiate from legitimate traffic.

DDoS attacks can disrupt online services, cause financial losses, and damage an organization’s reputation. A DDoS attack is like a group of people crowding the entry door of a shop, making it hard for legitimate customers to enter, thus disrupting trade and losing the business money.

To mitigate DDoS attacks, businesses employ various security measures like traffic filtering, load balancing, and content delivery networks (CDNs) to help distribute and absorb traffic. Additionally, monitoring tools and early threat detection can help defend against these cyber threats.

YAML

A human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML is a recursive acronym for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”.

Entitlement

A tickets ‘entitlement’ defines when and how it can be used. Fixed date tickets can be used many times during a valid date range i.e a school term pass. Fixed date ticket entitlement will be a date range. Flexible tickets are valid for use over a set time period e.g a day ticket which can be used for 24 hours from it’s activation time. Flexible ticket entitlement will be a short period of time and how many times it can be used.

Open Source

Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

Open source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production. Open source software is often cheaper, more flexible and has more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company.

ATCOCode (Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers Code)

A unique identifier UK-wide for bus stops used in NaPTAN.

NAP (National Access Points)

National Access Points facilitate access, easy exchange and reuse of transport-related data to help support the provision of EU-wide interoperable travel and traffic services to end-users. They can take various forms (database, data warehouse, data marketplace, repository, web portal etc) depending on the type of data concerned. List of PDF iconNational Access Points.

Sprint

A period of time (e.g. 14 days) in which an agreed-upon set of development tasks takes place. Sprints are short blocks of development time that allow new functionality and improvements to be in customers’ hands as quickly as possible.

Vehicle and Operator Services Agency

The Government agency responsible for dealing with certain kinds of commercial road-based operators, including bus service providers. Companies are required by Law to submit confirmed changes at least 56 days before said changes are implemented, although in special situations that can be relaxed.

Traveline

Traveline: A service funded by public transport companies across the country. Its aim is to provide comprehensive information on bus services on a regional basis, with some overlap between departments, to assist passengers in getting where they need to go, whilst also providing lesser information on other forms of public transport. Its information is relayed to councils who then update their own information based on this data, so operators endeavour to provide Traveline with up-to-date information at all times. A similar entity named Transport Direct deals with travel on a national basis, including private forms of transport and aviation.