Inside LabourStart

I discovered yesterday when setting up the Illinois labour newswire that it seemed to not be updating.  Then I realized that none of the newswires had been generated since 05:16 London time on Saturday.

I contacted our Internet service provider, 1&1, to complain that “cron” — the system command that instructs it to perform certain tasks at certain times — had obviously stopped working.  I’ve received two emails from 1&1 since then and they’ve not yet solved the problem.  This morning I’ve written to complain how long it is taking them.

I think they need to re-boot the server and I guess they’re reluctant to do this as it will bring down many sites, but they have no choice.

Unfortunately, it’s a Sunday and they work with a smaller staff today and will respond less quickly than we’d like.  The main effect of all this is that our newswires are not being updated — this is bad, but it’s not like our site is down or anything like that.

I’ve just announced to our list that we will offer customized labour newswires for states, provinces and regions in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa and India.  The first one was done for our friends in Kansas and you can see it here.  It will be interesting to see if this leads to a greater takeup of the newswires – let’s hope so.

More than a decade has past since we launched the Labour Newswire.  As union websites told us they added the newswire, we added them to our global directory.  The problem is, we don’t know when those sites remove the newswires or if the sites themselves disappear, and we don’t always know when new sites start using the newswire.  Which is why we need to go through the directory from time to time and clean it up.

I’ve just completed the clean-up of the UK section, which has dropped from 124 to 35 sites.  If this is true for most countries, then the actual number of websites using our newswires is closer to 200 than to 700.

The good news is some very large and important sites continue to use our newsire in the UK, such as the UNISON national and Scotland regional sites, and the national websites of PCS, TSSA and USDAW.  (Napo has temporarily taken the newswire down from its national site, but the General Secretary assures me that it will soon go back up.)  The popular TUC’s UnionReps.org.uk site continues to use it.  The health and safety newswire is particularly successful.

My next task is to start visiting UK union websites which do not use our newswire and get them to do so.  If any of you can do the same with your countries, it would be appreciated.  (I know that Stuart is working on the USA.)

We launched a major new campaign yesterday. The soft launch (appearing on our home page, on the list of active campaigns on our site, via our ActNOW newswire, through our Tweets, status on UnionBook and Facebook, etc.) generated a grand total of 11 messages sent, including my own.  The difference between this and doing a mass mailing is enormous — so let’s not believe any of the hype about alternatives to email.  At the moment, there are no alternatives to email — this is the only effective way to build online campaigns.

Today I’ve sent the campaign, and a reminder to check our recent English language mailings on Posterous, to our volunteer translators, including our new Italian language translator.  I hope to have this campaign, like the previous one, translated into Russian as well.

Book sales have fallen — the sales of Economics for Everyone were a one-off.  Very few people bought either the Silkwood book or the cartoon book we promoted yesterday.  When we have a poor week, the income is really only pennies and we do have to wonder if it’s worth it for us to appear to be commercial when we’re not really making any money.  There is, of course, the educational value of promoting these books and the help we’re giving to UCS, to keep them going.

I’ll be speaking about LabourStart campaigns at a number of events in the next few weeks, including the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress in London this coming weekend, in Leeds and Manchester in the next few weeks (at TUC events), and at the International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt next month.

As part of the effort to improve our capacity in other languages, I’ve been working with Andy Funnel to completely translate the interface for adding news in the French language for those correspondents who may not read English.  We’re nearly there — we’re working on the names of countries.  Once this is complete, we can do the same for other key languages, which will open the door to correspondents who do not read English.

I’ve been working on the Labour Newswire Global Network — the list of websites that use our newsfeeds — for the U.K.  I’m finding that a staggering number of sites have simply disappeared.  Unions that have merged into other unions — including some very large ones like the GPMU —  have simply given up on their domain names, which I find extraordinary.  Many local union websites have fallen into disuse, or evaporated into the ether.  In some cases, sites went through re-designs and in the process dropped our newswires.  Of the first 58 websites I’ve gone through, only 12 are active and using our newswires.  If this is true across all countries, then we don’t have 750 sites using our newswires — we are closer to having 150.  This means that we will need to seriously promote the newswires, especially the ActNOW one, to boost responses to our campaigns.

Meanwhile, the response to both our Photo of the Year competition and our Twitter survey have been great — much higher than anticipated.  2,833 votes cast so far in the competition with another 11 days to go (we’re already probably higher than we were last year) and the Twitter survey, with two more days to go, already has had 1,552 responses.  (More than two-thirds of the respondents do not use Twitter, by the way.)

Senior correspondent Oskar van Rijswijk came up with a great idea: Use Twitterfeed to automate tweets from LabourStart.  I set it up and it works.

Throughout the day, Twitter is being updated with three things from LabourStart:

• Our online campaigns
• Our global newswire in English
• Our latest book of the week

Right now, it works like a charm – you can see the results here.  Very cool.

Campaigns:

• We’ve asked to close down the Russian campaign after 4 months and 2,415 supporters.
• We are about to launch a new campaign in support of Turkish workers.  Both campaigns came from the International Metalworkers Federation.
• Campaign counter now works on all languages.

News:

• Work has begun on localizing the entry of news links – we’re testing this on French first.  The aim is to have all the input screens work in the local language so we can recruit correspondents who don’t know any English at all.

Book sales:

• We’ve sold 53 copies of the Global Unions, Global Business book, which is not bad.
• The Union Books group has 71 members, making it one of the largest groups on UnionBook.
• We’ve sold $986.55 worth of books at UCS in the first week of April.
• We’re in negotiations with the bookstore of one of the largest unions in Europe, Ver.di, in Berlin and might be able to begin selling German-language union books to German trade union members.
• We’re also talking to an Australian university press about helping to sell one of its titles.

Newswires:

• Did some more work on creating a Unicode version of these for sites which have switched over to Unicode. So far, French and German are working.

Fundraising:

• There will be concert in Sheffield on 2 May the proceeds of which will be donated to LabourStart – more details soon.
• We’re also finishing up the deal with No Sweat Apparel to produce a union-made UnionBook t-shirt.
• We’re following up with possible donations to LabourStart from Unite (UK) and CUPE (Canada).

We now once again have a JavaScript and RSS feed for LabourStart.tv — these are highlighted on the LabourStart.tv page.  I’ve also added the story’s source to the list.

I’ve finally gotten around to testing the Vietnamese language interface for our ActNOW campaigns – it seems to work.

We may be very near the end of the DESA campaign in Turkey — we generated over 5,000 messages.  It seems like the union has won a big victory – more tomorrow.

I’ve fixed our old subscribe-me page — it was still directing some people (hopefully, not many) to our old iContact mailing list.

In the new year, we’ll be selling copies of the TUC-produced book, Hadi Never Died.  This is an opportunity to show our support for our Iraqi comrades and to raise a small amount of money for LabourStart.  I’ve done up the first page promoting this on UnionBook.  In January – on the 4th anniverary of Hadi Saleh’s murder – we’ll promote this to our entire list.

LabourStart’s Wal-Mart page and our newswire have now been fixed and work well with the new database.

We’ve had some problems posting French-language news stories from the ICEM – and the issue may have been solved by changing the URL field in our news links database to Unicode.  Fingers crossed.  Thanks to both Andy and Tom for pointing this out.

The daily counter for our campaigns is now fixed – thanks to Derek for spotting that it wasn’t working.

We’ve done some work on fixing the character encoding for our ActNOW newswire in Norwegian – the problem for the moment is deciding which character encoding most Norwegian union websites use.  Thanks to Espen for spotting the problem.

There was a problem if you clicked on a state/province name on our front page that included a space — e.g., New York.  This has now been fixed.

The form which allows readers to submit a news story didn’t have enough space for long URLs – this has now been fixed.

As you may know, many people are getting error messages when trying to send off messages to Iran.

In the most recent quarter-hour period, I see that just under 100 messages were successfully sent off — so at the rate of 400 messages per hour, this is probably our biggest campaign ever.

There are many things going on here that can be slowing things down, so here are the steps I’ve taken to speed things up:

• When sending off a message, it no longer writes to our old flat ASCII database.  This was certainly slowing things down and I believe this is no longer necessary now that we have a much faster MySQL database.
• When displaying a campaign, we no longer show how many people have signed up (in real time) – but this will be restored later.

I’ve gotten a number of messages from people complaining – here is what I’ve replied to each one:

Thanks for writing – it appears that a very large number of people trying to access the page at the same time is causing this problem.  Please try again later.  Thanks for your patience.

This was relatively easy to do.