Inside LabourStart

John Wood of the TUC writes:

The TUC now has a simple aggregator for union press releases at www.unionnewswire.org.uk. It’s very much in beta (meaning it’s likely to fall over at a moment’s notice), but could be a useful tool to save LabourStart correspondents interested in the UK a little time in searching round union sites.

It uses a service called Dapper.net to make RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them yet, and a modified implementation of WordPress.org to automatically bring together 19 feeds in one place, and output a common listing as a web page, RSS feed, Twitter feed or email alerts (daily digest), so you can get the news in the format you like.

Unfortunately this is still only a very partial picture. A couple of unions in the UK display their press releases in formats that a scraper can’t understand, so can’t be syndicated, and almost half the UK’s unions (mostly the smaller unions who may not be so active in media work) don’t publish press releases on their sites at all.

For interested nerds, the whole thing is built in the open source CMS WordPress, using the excellent Feedwordpress plugin. Some unions that publish their press releases online but not yet by RSS are also included, thanks to the RSS scraping service open.dapper.net. Feeds that don’t quite fit are modified in Feedburner.com and/or Yahoo Pipes. Twitterfeed.com takes the combined RSS feed and publishes it onto www.twitter.com/unionnewswire

As all these tools are free or open source, the service only costs the price of a domain name and a shared hosting account to run (around £20 a year). I think aggregators may become useful tools for unions, helping us to share information around the movement for little cost, or to build instant portals with new views of a topic out of different types of information source – providing a useful service and a natural meeting point for people with any given interest, all under the banner of the union.

The problem I spotted a few days ago has now been resolved — I’ve looked over the last 550 or so news stories, one by one, and every single one now has a user ID.  Previously, as you know, some stories were appearing with no userID.

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.

I’ve noted that a number of recent news stories have been posted with the userID field blank.  This should not be happening.  I’ve made a couple of changes today to prevent this.  I tested it by adding a news story successfully.  If you run into any special problems when posting news stories, let me know urgently and I will fix this.

LabourStart’s UK news page — which was actually the very first one we created, a decade ago — has been relaunched on the model of the Australian, Canadian and US pages, and can be reached at any of the following URLs:

• http://www.labourstart.org.uk
• http://www.labourstart.org/uk
• http://uk.labourstart.org

In addition, I’ve fixed this and the other three editions to include a fairly prominent link back to global labour news (http://www.labourstart.org).

We’ve launched a new campaign in support of Compass workers in Algeria, at the request of an independent union there.  It’s now in English and French and the other langauge translators have been requested to get this up in additional languages as well.

This is in addition to the campaign launched in support of PSI, to pressure the Puerto Rican government.

Tomorrow I make a presentation a fringe meeting at the annual conference of PCS, Britain’s civil servants union, on the subject of online campaigning.

I’ve been adding a default language and country to many more correspondents accounts – so far, 181 correspondents have default languages set up.  I wrote a special program to show me which languages and countries a correspondent typically posts to, in order to help decide this.

We’ll be doing a second author interview for Labour’s Online Bookstore this week, to tie in with the promotion of Steve Early’s excellent new book, which we’re selling directly through the publisher.

This column by Jakob Nielsen is worth reading – we should find some way to share this at least with our most active correspondents.

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).

For a long time we’ve wanted to know what people are clicking on, which links are most popular, and I’ve just written a script that is the first step to allow us to do this.

What it does is send anyone clicking on a link on LabourStart through a script called ‘redirect.php’ — and this allows us to count.

The problem is, we did this once before, a couple of years ago, and certain URLs did not work well with it.

So what I’ve done is create a trial page here which runs this redirect function.

I need your help to test this.

Please use this as your LabourStart home page in English for the next few days. Click on links.  Let me know if anything bad happens.

If it all works OK, this will become our new home page in English and we can begin tracking what our visitors click on.

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.