Getting the Message Out
As an amateur 'Union Activist', it's important that you get your message out there to as many people as possible if you really want to make a difference. Posting in sites like this and my own forums and information website and sending 'letters to the editors' barely scratch the surface of reaching a large audience for your opinions, etc. If you really want to make a difference, it's going take going online with your own website. With all the new programs and technology out there, it's not all that difficult to do.
We can talk about the pro's and con's of lots of things. Things like 'open-source' (free) vs. fully licensed programs and the list can go on and on. But, let's just get started first.
Just recently, I became aware of a great way to get started without any obligations whatsoever to anyone and it's all free courtesy of Bill Gates and his flagship, Microsoft. Go here => http://officelive.microsoft.com/default.aspx to check it out. If you start out with the 'Basic' bottom-tier plan, it will never cost you a nickel and you can always upgrade as you see the need to.
There's lots of people (myself included) that will help you get started free of charge.
The important thing is to actually get started in the first place. We can never have too many personal websites parsing all the information that's out there. Good luck and be sure and post your new website address here so that we can help you get started. The future of organized labor is in the hands of the rank and file, let's not drop the ball, huh? :)
Thanks for posting
However, I have to say that I would not recommend going with a Microsoft product.
You might be interested to know that I'm going to be launching my own product here shortly for unions. It has a free offering as well. Stay tuned.
KISS, First things first
http://www.myibew.net/
email: myibew@yahoo.com
Steve,
That's all well and good, but from experience I'd advise you to save yourself a lot of work and forget about any free offerings beyond the blogs that you offer now. I also offer free blogs, free pages and sponsor free forums to any member that wants them. The only ones that have had even a glimmer of success have been the 'free' forums sites that I have set-up (there's a ton of companies that offer them) for members that have absolutely no connection whatsoever with my site. And that's better for both of us. People do some wierd things at times and the last thing in the world I want is another covert porn site operating under my banner.
99% of the time, people turn out to be a 'flash in the fire' as far as their own sites once they find out just how much work and time is involved. Always remember that most of these people are starting out at the bottom with virtually no experience in any type of computer languages, too.
Microsoft can't be all bad, no matter where you're coming from with that statement. The main thing is that it's free and there's no present or future obligations and that, in and of itself, makes MS a good place to get started. We're not talking about people like ourselves that have the experience to even make comparisons.
The main plan in the beginning to KISS. (keep it simple stupid)
cms debate
Hey you're BOTH right. It can't hurt to have another CMS (there's already
hundreds), and who knows it might well be a trendsetter. (How about
a way to send email to an event calendar in a semi-formatted way and
have the calendar pick out the essentials (like the date and time
at a minimum) and stick the whole thing in the calendar in the correct
location in date/time order? [need 'list' view and traditional calendar views] [needs to figure out if the message is
already html and de-html it or accept as is, so it doesn't end up with "double" html and etc details.]
Another problem I would really like to solve is a mailing list issue we have. There are people who sign up to union mailing lists using work accounts. This is extremely inadvisable. There are 2 main risk areas: various header fields that contain the senders' address(es) and
secondly those text signatures a lot of people use on email.
So a mailing list is needed that has the ability to have a cleansing
step inserted in the path. So I'm thinking of a program to which
strings like '@conservative.dept.com' are changed to '@nospam.4u'
for a lame example. The omnipresent mailman mailing list has a feature to remove sending headers and it works well. It cannot remove signatures however that someone's email appended. A problem is a lot of people going bonkers over the terrible thing that people are not id'd in posting. People really need to get over that. The employer is
picking people off left and right for using "their resources" for things not in the employer's mission and various other wrinkles that apply in this case. The removal of the headers stuff is only a partial fix because in reality the employer can log everything that goes through their servers so it really is not at all advisable for these people to use their work accounts for anything. That would be another option to have a mailing list that would not allow subscriptions from
certain domains.
But yes I am also a fan of windows and that is definitely a problem that
historically the FOSS community has avoided producing software for windows and that has if anything been very helpful to keeping the windows platform the territory of MS.
As an example, I wanted to run a collaboration portal like thing at work on windows and there's not that many low cost choices. I tried liferay (a java solution) but ran too afoul of bugs. I tried some other things also that didn't pan out. Eventually what did work was Sharepoint Services, which is a freebie one can have for 2003 server. And that's not a bad product. It had everything we wanted in it and it did work. Does a nice job of laying stuff out on the screen. (This is a .net solution.)