Improved display of news on UK, US, Aussie and Canadian pages
There are three priorities for news stories — top global stories, top national/language stories, and regular stories. On the newly created news pages for the USA, UK, Canada and Australia, we would show first any top priority global stories from that country, then the top national/language ones, and then the regular ones. The problem was the a top global story could sit there for weeks, not changing, as that country may not make the top global news stories that often. Today, following up on requests from Warren Bone in the UK and Derek Blackadder in Canada, I’ve changed this — now the top stories (global and national/language) appear as one block, followed by the regular stories. Problem solved, I think.
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The fosse seems to be widening between the English and non-English language parts of LabourStart.
There are still encoding problems with the javascript newswire and two issues concerning the non-English language RSS feeds:
– country names appear in English
– quotation marks and some apostrophes make the titles disappear.
These are preventing use of automatically produced services to develop LabourStart in French and no doubt in other languages too.
As for the other services we are promoting, with the exception of Facebook, they are all “non-English unfriendly”.
Perhaps, instead of trying to be politically correct, I should just say “foreign”.
I’d like to know how the other non-English correspondants feel about these issues.
We have a federal government agency that weekly posts a list of active strikes on the web. Might be a useful link to have on the Canada page permanently. Feasible? A box with one or two csuch links perhaps?
The issues Andy raises are on my to-do list. I have had an extensive correspondence with our comrades who work in different languages over the years as we try to get the entire site to work correctly in all languages. It has involved an absolutely massive amount of time and effort and I hope everyone reading this understands that all this work is done by a very small number of people, working as volunteers, with almost no resources.
In spite of that, I think our efforts to internationalize LabourStart have been enormously successful and are a source of pride — and we have done far better than many other bodies which have paid staffs and resources.
I welcome comrades who wish to help internationalize LabourStart even more to volunteer to help with coding and debugging and of course to help raise funds from unions in your countries to finance any paid help we may need to get.
As for the promotion of tools which do not work well in languages other than English, let’s not promote them to those languages. If, for example, Twitter only works in English, we should only promote it to our English-speaking readers.
Of course we cannot control what unions in non-English speaking countries are doing, and the fact that German unions like IG Metall and the DGB, or French unions like the CFDT, are using Twitter gives us a clue that all is not black and white, and that if they use these tools we can too.