Inside LabourStart

I’ve been investing considerably more time in UnionBook lately — in part because there is growing interest in using it.

Today I added a number of language plugins and UnionBook is now available in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Croatian, Serbian, Finnish, and Italian, as well as the original languages of English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish and Polish.

We have been asked to create versions in Portuguese, Indonesian and Korean and I think we’ll need to put out a general appeal for help with translating Elgg modules, which is what we rely upon to get this done.

We’re about to launch two campaigns — one global and one UK-specific — both submitted by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Britain.  The global one is a joint initiative involving the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, the ICEM, the TUC and others and supports Iraqi oil workers.  The UK one relates to attacks on the public sector in the channel island of Jersey.

I upgraded UnionBook successfully to the very latest version (1.7) which is a good thing, but it has resulted in a couple of bugs.  The first one was fixed quickly with the support of the Elgg community.  The second one is currently being dealt with — here’s what I posted to the front page of UnionBook:

We’ve just upgraded UnionBook from Elgg 1.5 to 1.7; expect some bugs and please let us know when something which previously worked no longer does. And yes, we already know about the “Form is missing __token or __ts fields” error message and hope to have that one sorted soon. Thanks for your patience.

This page will be updated regularly as we count down to the opening of the LabourStart global solidarity conference in Hamilton, Ontario on 9 July.

• 9.4.10 – 125 registered; 18 paid

N.B. We’ve eliminated nearly all the duplicates, which means that new number of those registered is considerably lower than we’d been reporting.

Derek Blackadder and Eric Lee are scheduled to do three appearances at Canadian union events between now and our conference in July.

Eric has been invited to speak at the Canadian Association of Labour Media (CALM)/LabourTech event in Windsor on 13-16 May (Derek as well).

Derek has been invited to speak on LabourStart’s behalf to conferences in Toronto and Halifax.

I’ve taken the first steps toward creating a version of LabourStart — really just baby steps.  But if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you might want to have a look and make suggestions.

From you iPhone/iPod, using Safari go to http://www.labourstart.org/i

If you want to save this as an icon on your home screen, simply click on the “+” button on the bottom of the page and select ‘Add to home screen’.

As I say, this is not even the Beta version yet … but you can see where we’re heading.

I’ve been invited to address LaborComm 2010, a conference in Ankara, Turkey on 2-5 May.

Details about the conference are available online, but only in Turkish.

They’ve asked for “a presentation and sort of keynote speech on labourstart (org,tv, radio) experiences ..”.

Joshua Amberg, one of the judges of this year’s LabourStart labour video of the year competition, asked all the others (and me) to give their answers to the above question.  He’s published these on his blog, Look Back: Labor and the Moving Image.  Interesting reading.

There was a security breach at LabourStart, with hackers being able to install scripts that were sending out spam.  This was due to us using PHP version 4 (which our web hosting company uses by default) instead of version 5, which is inherently more secure.  The hacked scripts have been removed, the site was unlocked, and I’ve just given the entire site a global instruction to use PHP 5.  This may cause problems in some PHP scripts, but probably not.  If you notice anything, email me.  For now, we appear to be OK.

Last night we received this message from our web host, 1&1 Internet:

“we received further complaints about spam being sent from your 1&1 webspace. As this represents an imminent danger of a blacklisting for 1&1 mail relays, your 1&1 webspace will be locked after this e-mail. To get this lock released, please advise us within which period of time you will be able to address the problem. To do so, reply to this e-mail and please preserve our reference [Ticket AB11098796] in your message. In case the number of complaints is extremely high, you might be receiving this message only a short time after our first one. In this case, we regret that you might not have had the opportunity to prevent the lock and resolve the problem on your side. Please understand nevertheless that this lock is inevitable to protect our infrastructure. Thank you for your understanding. We appreciate your cooperation.”

I replied: “We do not spam – and we do not maintain a mailing list on 1&1.  We have had this discussion before with your colleagues. Please let us know the nature of the complaints and we will deal with them, but right now we have no idea what you are talking about.”

Two hours before, we received a similar warning, and I replied to that one as well: “We are not transmitting spam and never have.  Can you send us details about who is complaining and what they are receiving and we will look into this.  Thank you.”

Eleven hours have passed; the site appears to be up.  I will update you if I hear more.