May
14
2013

The week in review – 7.5 – 14.5

Campaigns: The Bangladesh campaign is one of our very largest, with over 14,000 messages sent — we got a big boost from the British TUC which did an image that went viral and brought a lot of attention the campaign. We will probably close this soon as IndustriALL and UNI have made a lot of progress this week.

The Hong Kong campaign closed and we’ve asked about closing the Mexico campaign after three months — waiting to hear from IndustriALL about that one. We asked the RMT in the UK if we could close the “Justice for the 33” campaign and have been asked to continue to run with it for another month or so.

In addition to publicizing our own campaigns, we were asked to do mailings and promote Amnesty International’s new campaign in support of releasing jailed Bahraini teacher Mahdi, which we did. We also did a special promotion on Fiji for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the ITUC.

On the technical side, we fixed some of the German text, got an Indonesian ActNOW newswire working, and have made more progress on the new campaigns database which will make our translators’ job considerably easier.

News home pages: Edd’s been working on some of the more complex language home pages which have not yet been moved over to the new format (Dutch, Polish); Eric will be completing work on the French version in the next few days. We fixed a lot of things on the country pages this week, including how campaigns appear (now showing the photo from the most recent campaign and horizontal lines to separate them); news stories that appear in the top 10 don’t repeat in the stories below; when a state/province/region appears in the headline (e.g., England), it now appears in a different colour (as it does in the list of stories); there’s now an ad for the new book on all the country pages in English; the “for more info” link now appears again on all stories where there’s something in that field.

Book 2: Sales are going well; we’ve sold 180 copies — 156 of them this week. We’ll begin work on a Kindle edition this week. Matt H. has volunteered to work on a German edition of this (and the previous book).

Berlin/Vancouver 2014: Edd’s been in touch with some German comrades and we’re making slow and steady progress. Derek is talking to comrades in Canada about a global solidarity conference there as well.

Mailing list: We had a problem with the latest version of our Sendy software — it was screwing up character encoding. This was now fixed.

CloudFlare: The adoption of CloudFlare, which we pay to ensure that our site is accessible everywhere at an improved speed, and which will keep us going even if we go offline for a while, has caused some teething pains. One of them was a delay in seeing the new photo of the day, which Derek has been posting. This has now been fixed.

Today in Labour History: I noticed that the word ‘more’ would appear even when there was no more; this has now been fixed. We have a lot more stories in the database now and a big thanks to Andy for translating so many of them into French.

Fund-raising: The ITF has pledged to donate something, and we’re expecting a donation from the RMT as well, which voted at its conference last year to support LabourStart. In addition, we’ve put in requests for grants for specific purposes to two UK-based charities — the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the Edge Fund.

 

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