Dec
31
2009
0

Happy new year to you all!

A very happy new year to all LabourStart’s correspondents and readers.

The next update of this page will be on Monday, 4 January.

Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Dec
30
2009
0

Our new mailing lists now have owners

I’ve now written to our key editors and our mailing lists in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, French, Spanish, Polish, German, and Dutch are now ‘owned’ by them — and they’ve all gotten an email with basic instructions on how to mail to their lists and how to create customized subscribe pages in their languages.  Doing this is quite easy in PHPlist and was slower and more cumbersome in our previous system.

Large lists without owners at the moment are Italian (419 – between translators at the moment), Portuguese (199 – must find a volunteer translator), and Russian (222 – must find a volunteer translator).  I’ll try to have these sorted in the next several days.

Written by ericlee in: Mailing list |
Dec
29
2009
0

Move to laborlists.org – complete

All 24 of our mailing lists are now running PHPlist on our new, US-based laborlists.org server.  Moving the 53,000 strong English list proved to be somewhat tricky, but that is now complete.  It’s quite easy to give control of these lists to our editors, and the first one — Espen — has been given control of the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish lists, with other editors to follow in the next few days.  In a few days we’ll be able to shut down our use of unionlists.org.uk, saving us £720 a year.

Written by ericlee in: Mailing list |
Dec
28
2009
0

We begin moving over our lists

PHPlist is an open source newsletter manager.

PHPlist is an open source newsletter manager.

My plan is that in 2010 we will consolidate all our lists (and the IUF’s as well) under the laborlists.org domain, which is running the open source PHPlist system.  We will not only save hundreds of pounds per year, but will also have the flexibility to create lists at will, which will come in handy as we get closer to our upcoming conference, and for specific campaigns.  We’ve lacked this flexibility and control in the earlier systems we used.  PHPlist also contains a double-optin subscribe mechanism, list segmentation, click tracking and other features.

Over the weekend, I moved the following lists to the new system: LabourStart Correspondents and these languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Chinese, Czech, Esperanto, Greek, Creole, Bulgarian and Finnish.  (None of these are being used at the moment.)  If you visit LabourStart in any of those languages (Czech is a good example) you’ll see the new ‘join our mailing list’ form at work.

I intend to begin moving the more complex mailing lists — the ones we use regularly — over the next few days.  Attentive readers will recall that I attempted this a couple of years ago without success — couldn’t get PHPlist to work, even with technical support from the company.  This time, for some reason, it worked without a hitch.  Thanks go out to Jasper Goss of the IUF Asia Pacific region who convinced me to give it another go, and suggested a very inexpensive web host in the USA which they have used for years.

Written by ericlee in: Mailing list |
Dec
25
2009
0

Merry Christmas to you all

And … we now have 432 people pre-registered for our conference (173 from Canada and the rest from 65 other countries).

I’d be very suprised if this doesn’t reach 500 in the new year.

Written by ericlee in: 2010 Conference |
Dec
24
2009
0

LabourStart in Numbers [5]

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of November in brackets.

UnionBook has not actually lost members; what’s happened is that I’ve deleted hundreds of banned members.  The current number is almost entirely real trade unionists using the site.  Our mailing lists have hardly grown at all, due both to the holiday season and the lack of new, inspiring campaigns.  The Facebook group continues to grow fairly dramatically, as does the number of followers on Twitter.  Our new LinkedIn group has quintupled in size over the last month, though I can’t say we’ve yet found a real use for it.

  • Mailing lists – subscribers: 60,535 [+217]
  • UnionBook – members: 4,328 [-608]
  • Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,604 [+90]
  • Twitter – followers: 1,940 [+70]
  • Correspondents: 722 [+8]
  • Union group on Flickr: 526 [+4]
  • LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 79 [+65]
Dec
23
2009
0

Once again, we don’t win the Knight News Challenge

Received this form email today:


Thank you for your recent application LabourStart Does Local: Bringing union news down to street level.for funding through the Knight News Challenge. We have reviewed your request, and unfortunately, we must decline your application at this time. Even though you submitted a good idea, it does not meet the specific requirement of using the latest innovations in technique to inform communities.

Written by ericlee in: Knight News Challenge |
Dec
22
2009
0

Nearly 300 pre-registered for LabourStart conference

The conference is more than 6 months away.  We’ve not yet published an agenda, nor announced any speakers.  It’s Christmas week and many of our readers are already on their holiday breaks.  We’ve said nothing about helping to pay for people’s travel costs.  And yet … nearly 300 people have already expressed interest in attending our conference in July.  I repeat: many of them will not attend, especially those who need to travel far and at great expense.  But with the interest so far shown by the Canadian unions in this, I think we can safely predict that the number of participants in our next conference will be counted in the hundreds.

Written by ericlee in: 2010 Conference |
Dec
21
2009
0

Conference publicity begins [3]

In addition to the efforts I’ve made recently, Derek has written to his Canadian list and the result is we now have 81 people expressing interest in attending the conference, half of them from Canada.  I realize that many of these people will not attend (some are obviously going to need financial support to attend) but the numbers are already starting to look good.  Today I’m doing save-the-date messages to:

This should result in a big jump in the number of registrants, and in the new year, when we have a first draft agenda, we’ll make a renewed push.

Written by ericlee in: 2010 Conference |
Dec
19
2009
0

LaborLists.org

One of my goals in 2010 is to save LabourStart a considerable amount of money by reducing the number of servers we currently run and web services we pay for.  In addition to the LabourStart site on 1&1 Internet, we have a server on Memset (for UnionBook – £3,367/year), one on 1&1 Internet (for an abortive attempt to set up PHPlist but also currently running a number of IUF mailing lists – £207/year), and we pay a monthly fee of £60 to UnionLists.org.uk for our mailing lists (£720/year).

I want try to shut down the last two of these and have taken the advice of the person who does the IUF’s Asian Food Worker site and have purchased a very low cost server in the US (£120/year).  My intention is to set up PHPlist there and run all the LabourStart lists and possibly the IUF lists as well.  I have already registered the domain name laborlists.org for this server.  The cost saving will be £807 per year.

We’ll obviously also be looking at ways to reduce UnionBook costs, or to get a union (or unions) to pay for this.

Written by ericlee in: Mailing list,UnionBook |

Powered by WordPress | Aeros Theme | TheBuckmaker.com WordPress Themes