Inside LabourStart

At the LabourStart correspondents meeting last Sunday in Hamilton, someone suggested we look into BuddyPress as an alternative to Elgg.  It looks interesting, but I’m not convinced we have good reason to migrate (even if we can migrate).  So I’ve put it out there via UnionBook, Facebook, Twitter, etc and will see if someone thinks this is a great idea and can make a compelling case for it.

I closed down the Iraq oil workers campaign in all languages – it had been running for more than 3 months.

I’ve setup the Serbian edition of LabourStart, and am currently working with a comrade there to get it off the ground.

Last Friday I recorded my sixth podcast, this time on the subject of hashtags and how they were used at the LabourStart conference.  As of this afternoon, 376 people have downloaded it and listened to it.  I also wrote up an account of the conference and posted it to my blog.  Then I updated the conference page to include links to my article and the podcast relating to it.

I sent out mass mailing promoting our book of the month, my podcast, two articles about the conference and our ActNOW newswire.  As a result of this, we sold a few books and got a couple more sites to adopt our newwire.

Well, that was pretty amazing.

I’ll be publishing a lot of material about the conference in the next few days on the conference website itself – http://www.labourstart.org/2010

Meanwhile, today I’ll add some odds and ends about stuff I’m doing as I do it.

UnionBook: Just launched a $150 Google adwords campaign — this money is a gift from Google, so we should use it.  UnionBook has been growing slowly but surely over the last few weeks and this may give it a boost.  Also publicized UnionBook in my daily wire post/tweet/Facebook update.

Book of the month: We’re promoting this starting today.

Campaigns: Have asked permission to close down the Iraqi oil unions campaign, which has been running for more than three months.

Internationalization: We have a volunteer in Serbia who is keen to help us get our Serbian language edition off the ground; today I sent him the file for translation.

Conference followup: I’ve added links to articles about the conference, videos, photos and Tweets here.  Also removed the ads for the conference from the front page of LabourStart and UnionBook, and from the LabourStart correspondents sign in page.

Our conference is now 3 days away.  We have 292 registrants (up 34 in the last week) of whom 103 have paid their fees (up 9 in the last week) — for a total of C$14,572. The conference website is located here.

There’s been frenetic activity on both sides of the Atlantic as we do final preparations for the LabourStart conference which opens on Friday this week.  Visa issues, last minute cancellations, last minute registrations, the sudden discovery that we forgot to tell everyone something absolutely vital … it’s been fun.

What this means for those of you reading this is that don’t expect much in the way of answers to emails, or solving of problems, over the next week or so.  We’re going to be completely immersed in this until I’m back in London on the 13th.

I also urge everyone to refrain from sending emails to me unless they are extremely urgent during this period as I expect to be overwhelmed with conference-related emails and will be able to read or respond to most others.  Thanks for your understanding.

We’ve closed down the campaign in support of imprisoned Turkish woman trade union leader Seher Tumer, but are replacing it with two campaigns.

One which is now live is an appeal by PSI in support of a number of jailed trade union leaders, including Tumer.

The other, coming from the ITF, will be in support of UPS workers in Turkey.

There is already a long list of things to include in our next mass mailing, which will go out this afternoon, including an important update on the IUF campaign we promoted yesterday.

The story of LabourStart’s mailing lists is an epic saga — it goes on and on …

In early 2010 we settled on what seemed to be a good solution.  We had an inexpensive web hosting company in the USA (DirectNIC) and free, open source software (PHPlist) and it all seemed to finally work.

And then last week, DirectNIC informed us that as we were using a shared computer with other customers, we couldn’t do mass mailings.  And shut down our site without warning.

The person who initially recommended DirectNIC to us was using it, as we are, to send out mass mailings.  But his lists are obviously much smaller and his activity went unnoticed.

DirectNIC doesn’t offer dedicated servers, so we couldn’t just upgrade.

PHPlist itself does offer hosting, which sounds great, except that their peak plan is 100,000 messages a month (we send something like three times that amount) and even that would have cost us something like $2,160 a year (or triple that amount).

But we had an alternative — a virtual web host on the same company that hosts LabourStart (1&1 Internet) — which we set up two years ago.

Back in 2008, I tried to set up PHPlist there and didn’t succeed.  I even paid PHPlist to install it for us, but it still didn’t work, which is why I gave up and we tried other things (iContact, unionlists.org.uk).

I did, however, succeed this week.  (I must have learned something since 2008.)

I was able to import one of our three databases, the one hosting the mailing lists for Justice for Iranian Workers, Radio Labour and others.

Yesterday and the day before, I tried to import the much larger database holding LabourStart’s 70,000 plus subscribers and it repeatedly failed.  The import process would work for several hours and then generate odd error messages.

Desperate to get a mailing out as the IUF was eager for us to quickly promote their Coke Pakistan campaign, I improvised a solution.

I set up a version of PHPlist for LabourStart, configured it, and then imported (in blocks of 10,000 addresses at a time) LabourStart’s English language mailing list.

The mailing went out successfully.  The current web hosting company did throttle it, preventing us from sending out the mailing at top speed, but it appears to have all gone out.

This means that I now need to import each of the other lists in different languages, one by one, to recreate the templates and administrators for all of them, as well as to do this for the IUF.  It will be a lot of work, but I hope to have it completed by the weekend.

I ask everyone to be patient; I will inform individual editors who need to know.

The good news is that the software is identical, so there’s no learning curve.  All we’ve really done is move from one host to another.

Let’s just hope that this host leaves us alone and lets us send out our mailings in peace.