Jan
28
2011

Friday morning updates: campaigns, newswires, database, Amnesty, survey

  • I had  a meeting yesterday with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International UK.  We discussed among other things Turkey and Mexico and ways we can continue to work together – including Amnesty’s involvement in the next LabourStart conference.
  • Our survey now has 1,300 responses – a big gain over the last week.  I will close it down on Monday and report the results.
  • I managed to dilute the size of LabourStart’s news links database.  We are supposed to be restricted to 100 MB of data, though our internet service provider has not made an issue of us going slightly above that.  Nevertheless, I now have a system in place to check once a month and to keep the size of the database under control.
  • I’ve created a new newswire – soon to be publicized – in French covering the countries of the Maghreb. In the course of doing so, I found that all our regional newswires are still referencing our old database and need to be fixed.  I will do this next week.
  • LabourStart was temporarily offline – even emails to labourstart.org weren’t working – very briefly last week.  Our internet service provider spotted the problem and solved it even before we complained.
  • Our new campaigns are picking up support – the Turkey campaign has 1,388 supporters after one day; the Bangladesh campaign has 4,356 supporters after 8 days.

2 Comments »

  • What do the 100MB represent in time? I mean how far back does the newslink archive go? Does keeping “the size of the database under control” mean deleting the oldest titles? I realize that most of the stories on the links disappear after a certain time but the headlines and source could be useful to anyone researching labour history in the future, if only to request a paper copy. Is it so expensive to add more MB’s ?

    Comment | January 29, 2011
  • admin

    Our web hosting company allows us to have quite a few databases, but each individual one is limited to 100 MB, so it’s not a question of money – it’s a question of time and effort to remove entries from one (the current) database, to move into another, and then to make that archive accessible as well. Right now we go back 7 years or so. Let me think about what is involved here and whether it is necessary to make an effort.

    Comment | January 29, 2011

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