After 15 years, a new way to post news quickly and easily to LabourStart
People have been asking for something like this for a very long time. Today I finally wrote the code to do it.
Login to post news as you normally would. On the second screen, the one that’s entitled “Main Menu”, look at the text highlighted to the left. The yellow arrow is pointing at it.
Drag the red box that says “Add2LS” up to your bookmarks toolbar. (The bookmarks toolbar varies from browser to browser, but usually it’s the part of your screen immediately above the web page you are viewing.)
Leave it there — it will say “Add2LS”.
You only have to do this once.
Now, go visit a website that’s a source of labour news.
Find a news story you want to put on LabourStart.
Click on the “Add2LS” link in your toolbar.
And magic — you can begin adding the news story.
The link sits there permanently in your toolbar, and you never have to login again.
News stories always appear in one window (or tab) and the form in another so that you can glance back at the news story for stuff like the name of the publication, the title, and so on.
This should make it easier and quicker than ever for correspondents to post news stories.
Try it and let me know what you think — and how it can be improved.
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Way cool!
Great! So if all the fields were on the same page, could you fill them all in automatically? Minor detail: no logo showing in my Firefox’s fav tab (would make it easier to spot amonst the others).
I looked into showing a logo — there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do this. It’s complicated, because bookmarklets are not strictly speaking regular bookmarks linking to a web page (which would have a logo, called a favicon). Instead they’re bits of JavaScript code, so favicons don’t work on them.
As for filling in fields automatically, there’s no easy way to do this. We have the URL, but determining what’s the title, source, language, etc isn’t automated — in an ideal world, all websites would use markup to do this, but they don’t.