Inside LabourStart

LabourStart has always been designed to work on every device — desktop and laptop PCs, tablets, smartphones. But we recently started receiving reports from some BlackBerry users that they were no longer able to access our campaigns on their phones.

This turned out to be due to our SSL certificate being rejected — that’s the certificate that allows us to use the https:// prefix for our campaigns, which makes the transmission of user information more secure. Our friends at WebArchitects rushed to our rescue, changing the way our certificate is done. And the result is that once again, everyone can support our campaigns — even BlackBerry users!

P.S. If you ever want to test our SSL security for the campaigns website, you can do so here. But be aware — it takes a few minutes for the test to complete. We’re currently rated A+, which is pretty good, I imagine.

Recently our web hosting company (1&1 Internet) announced that it was upgrading our site to newer software and some things — not clear which things — may stop working.  

And, as predicted, some things did.  Among these were:

• The script to add new correspondents.
• The script to change the photo of the day.
• The script showing an archive of our health & safety news stories.

More things may be broken as well — we’re learning about these one at a time.

All of the above were quickly fixed yesterday, but if you come across something that doesn’t work any more (on our news site, not our campaigns) — and that throws up a generic error page — please let us know by email.  Thanks!

We continue to experiment with ways to make LabourStart available on mobile devices.

Our latest effort is the beginnings of a LabourStart “magazine” on Flipboard.

If you use Flipboard on your phone, please email me and I’ll get back to you with more details.

Thanks.