2005-07-03 Newsletter #2: Another productive week
Greetings!
I'm happy to report that the Communicate or Die community continues to grow at a good clip. We're still adding a new member at about the pace of about one per day. Last Friday, our busiest day, saw about 600 page views! And that figure does not include my own page views or web crawlers (search engines and other content indexing tools).
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to register. And a special shout goes out to Eric Lee, the founder of LabourStart and the brightest luminary in labor's Internet community, who also joined our community this week. Welcome, Eric!
Eric came to us by way of the week's most popular thread, a posting by Bill Bumpus who shared his ideas about how to improve LabourStart's news feed. You can read Bill's critique and Eric's comments here: http://www.communicateordie.com/node/58. Thanks for your contribution, Bill. You can also read my proposal for improving the feed by visiting http://www.communicateordie.com/node/69. Please have a look. I'd love some more feedback.
This week marked the occasion of our first online interview. Fittingly, it's with Internet pioneer Bill Pearson, retired president of UFCW Local 789, who founded the famous http://www.YouAreWorthMore.org web site. The interview drives home how powerful, and how much work, a union's interactive web site can be. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from a master and ask your own questions of him at http://www.communicateordie.com/node/77.
Our most productive member this week was Mark Dilley (http://www.communicateordie.com/user/6). He has posted a few blog items and many, many comments. He is also helping me test and troubleshoot the site's new and still crude wiki feature which you can see at http://www.communicateordie.com/node/66. I want to publicly thank Mark for his help. He sets a good example for what it's going to take to make the CoD community an interesting Internet destination for our fellow union brothers and sisters.
Speaking of Mark, we have done away with the timestamp on each post and comments per his request. See the full discussion for his reasons at http://www.communicateordie.com/node/60. Next week, I'll poll members on the web site to see if they want to turn the timestamp back on. If you have requests or suggestions for improving the user experience to CoD, please submit your suggestion at http://www.communicateordie.com/node/add/forum/25.
Technical folks out there will interested to know that I have installed a module that will provide CoD with more accurate statistics. You may have noticed that each post has a counter associated with it. Everytime the someone clicks on a post, the counter is increased by one. But those numbers were inflated because they counted clicks by me and web crawlers (search engines). A Drupal module called statistics_filter now identifies these "fake" clicks and doesn't count them. This will help us paint a more accurate picture of just how many people are looking at our material.
Before wrapping up, I want to make another appeal to share your thoughts with our community by posting a blog item at http://www.communicateordie.com/node/add/blog. Also, please help spread the word about the CoD to your friends and post links to from your site to here. The faster we grow this community, the faster we can make a difference to the labor movement.
Happy Independence Day!
In Solidarity,
Steve