Archives: Help and advice

I've tried posting a blog entry 3X and it keeps showing "steward320 has not made any blog entries."

Why? I've followed every step and filled in every required catagory.

Thanks,

Wade Laszlo

I'm an online editor with CIO.com, and I write and edit labor- and career-related stories for the site.  I recently wrote a blog entry about the need for IT workers to unionize, and it's elicited a pretty strong response from readers (17 comments). What amazes me about the response is the number of IT workers who are so anti-union. I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, but I would just think in this day in age--with IT workers' job security threatened by the economic problems facing the U.S., the rise of outsourcing and off-shoring, the lobbying to raise the caps on H-1B visas, etc.--that IT workers would be more recpetive to the concept of organizing. I would think that at this time they'd be desperate enough to look to anything that might help them stand up to corporate America.  But many of them still believe that training, education and re-skilling is the key to them remaining competitive in such a tight market. Many also believe labor unions do more harm than good, that they only help to accelerate outsourcing. And in spite of all the detrimental things capitalism and the open market is doing to their jobs and to the IT profession, they still seem to blindly believe in market forces. I don't get it.  Can you explain why IT professionals (software developers, network engineers, architects, business analysts, help desk professionals, DBAs, system admins, etc.) are so anti-union?

I wrote a custom Grievance Tracking System with MySQL and PHP backend. Has anyone else written anything similar or used any web based grievance tracking/cataloging/etc. software? I'm curious what else is out there and looking for ideas for what to add to my system. I'd like to release the source code for other peoples use. I'll need to clean up some things first, particularly some of the security vulnerabilities that are glaring if you read the source code. I'm also currently using cookies for session management and would like to switch to native PHP sessions.. if anyone has any advice on using PHP sessions let me know.

Hello,

I used the following url for my News Reader:
http://www.communicateordie.com/node/feed

But it contains all the html code.

Is this not the right url or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks

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.

Collaborative Site check - please

I would like help with a new drupal site from those here that are CoD subscribers that know their way around the Drupal program, perhaps some you have time and can advise as well.

Even if you don’t use Drupal, I would appreciate your comments regarding both the design from a technical and a content analysis. I have it installed at www.clnews.org/drupal/ Please take a look.

My goal is to build an online community of labor activists, using the theme or notion of "stories". I'm totally blown away by the concept of taxonomy. Yet, necessarily the site must be designed with a minimum of classes or categories as starting points to hang any submitted stories on. Can anyone discuss this with me?

So the problem I am asking for help is a discussion on both a technical design evaluation and an overall site narrative design evaluation. Anybody interested?

With Respect and Cheers,
Tony Budak

I have my grandfather's union card from the St. Regis Lumbermen's Union in St. Regis, MT from May 1899. I have had no success in trying to find anything about the union or anything else that relates to my grandfather's history out there. He came from Demark in the late 1800's and ended up working in a steel mill in Granite City, IL (that's where I retired from with 36 years). I would really like to know something about his past in Labor. Anyone have any suggestions? I have tried Google, etc.

Ok I can't take the hype. I have to try the infamous ruby on rails. http://www.rubyonrails.org/

I managed to pretty much avoid java after I was put off by a buggy servlet server, despite the huge amount of foaming at the mouth enthusiasm oracle inflicted on their customers to embrace it. (You can lead customers to java but you can't make them use it, especially not if you're replacing a higher level language (plsql) with a far lower one (java) :-) I managed to almost completely avoid learning php, unbelievable as that might seem. I never got anywhere near python and have completely avoided .net another thing on Oracle's radar. I've only done the barest minimum with javascript. So I definitely have sales-resistance, staying in the 80's with Perl. But all the promo over ruby is very tempting...
Unfortunately tho, where I could really use a web site overhaul is
on a hosted site that doesn't provide ruby etc. (Cheap commercial web hosts sure know how to make things difficult. If some application
is not provided/installable by fantastico or something like that you
may be SOL because you don't have a lot of leeway in what you can do to run/change things.)
Not a lot of web hosting firms are doing ruby, yet:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts
But anyway at least I can try it out on
one of my work machines as long as what I'm using it for is "in the mission" and we do have reasons to do some things via the web.
So anyone already checked this ruby stuff out? As a legacy pre-object programmer and gasp, pre-ansi C programmer, who was not swept away nor even slightly favorably impressed by the object schtick, will this newfangled view/model/controller thing
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html
totally overwhelm my brain or can I just hack away regardless?
In any case I'll report back as to what I find unless someone beats me to it.

My union uses Drupal (4.6.3) for our website. One thing we haven't yet integrated into the site is emailing the union members. We send regular emails to our members (approximately weekly), to keep them up to date about developments in negotiations, upcoming meetings, etc. Currently someone has to go to the computer in the union office to send an email.

I'd like to be able to send emails to our membership via the web using a Drupal module. I know there are a few that do mail lists and such, but we have specific needs and I'm not sure which, if any, best serve our needs. I'm looking for some advice! I'd also be open to a non-Drupal solution that is fairly easy to install, set up and maintain.

I don't want to create mailing list where people can unsubscribe themselves. Since the union is obligated to keep all members informed of what the union is doing, we don't want people to be able to easily opt out of receiving emails. I think that rules out some of the better free, standalone solutions like Mailman or Dadamail (correct me if I'm wrong).

Not all our members are registered with an account on the website, so modules that just email all the website subscribers / members wouldn't work. We need something where we can continually import the updated email list from our database, and email to that list.

Anyone have any thoughts or advice?

I am preparing AUD's "Best Rank-and-File Website of 2005" contest (blogs, too) and want to add an online poll so that in addition to the judged contest, we can have a "people's choice" vote.

Looking for free, open source, secure, etc. and above all easy way to do this. It can be via an online service. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Matt

(For background on the contest, see this article on the previous contest http://www.uniondemocracy.org/UDR/55-website%20contest%20results.htm. See also Art Shostak's kind comments http://www.communicateordie.com/node/94)