What I’ve been up to these last five days \u2026<\/p>\n
I’ve made serious improvements to the script that shows who is posting news<\/a> to LabourStart. It now shows the correspondent’s full name and country, and totals for the day and month, making it much more useful I think. And I’ve made this more accessible – but only to correspondents who have logged in, who will see a link to it. <\/p>\n We learn from this that about 91<\/strong> correspondents have been active in March, and they have collectively posted 4,491<\/strong> news links to our database — an average of 49<\/strong> each this month, and an average for all correspondents of nearly 150<\/strong> news stories per day, every day. At this rate, we’re publishing over 50,000<\/strong> news stories every year.<\/p>\n Yesterday, I met with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International, and we discussed joint work. Today, for example, Shane will be promoting our Iran campaign<\/a> to the more than 11,000 names on Amnesty’s UK trade union mailing list.<\/p>\n I have begun adding papers submitted by the participants from the Middle East and North Africa to our 2011 conference page<\/a>. These were sent to us by the Solidarity Center, and are in English, French and Arabic.<\/p>\n I did some initial work on an RSS news feed for Europe at the request of a British trade unionist — but it’s still buggy and needs to be fixed.<\/p>\n I worked on the mycampaigns.cgi script, which shows you which campaigns you’ve signed up and which you’ve missed – on the language editions. There are still character encoding problems which I will fix very soon.<\/p>\n The Hebrew edition of LabourStart<\/a> needed to be fixed up after years of neglect, so I did such things as add links to all our campaigns in Hebrew, translated the names of countries when we’re displaying news, and made sure that all the text which had been in English (including a link to sign up to the mailing list) is now in Hebrew. I’ve also been posting Hebrew news every day (other correspondents have also posted) and am looking for news in Hebrew that’s not only from Israel — which is not easy to do. (Israeli media are, understandably, focussed almost entirely on domestic and regional news.)<\/p>\n I followed up with the Education International on the Bahrain campaign<\/a>, which has been running for two months and is considerably less successful (in terms of support) than the Iran campaign. I always do these follow-ups two months after a campaign is launched.<\/p>\n