June 2006 – Page 2 – A resurgent Liberal

Another Lib Dem widget

Hat-tip to Will Howells for creating the second Lib Dem widget.

The rather fine ‘Lib Dem blogs’ plug in on the right hand side (of the front page).

Will’s still tweaking it, but let him know if you’d like to try the latest version.

For all the latest news on Lib Dem widgets, check out this blogs ‘widget’ category.

Postnote:

Will has now supplied me with the original code. If you already have widgets installed as part of your WordPress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:

Download the ldblogbox.php.txt file and save it or upload it into your widget plug-ins directory under the name ‘ldblogbox.php’
Go into the ‘Plugins’ area of your WordPress installation and activate the ‘LibDemBlogs link box’ widget.
Go into the ‘Sidebar Widgets’ section of the ‘Presentation’ area of WordPress, and drag your new ‘LibDemBlogs box’ widget to the desired location.
Hit ‘Save Changes’

er… that’s it.

And if you’re not a widget user…

In case you’re not a widget user, here’s some simple code which can also be used to sign people up to your site…

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://petitions.libdems.org.uk/showCode.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

should produce the following:

In case you’re not a widget user, here’s some simple code which can also be used to sign people up to your site…

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://petitions.libdems.org.uk/showCode.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

should produce the following:

Again… any ideas for improvement are most welcome. There’s obviously loads that could be done to make it ultra-sexy but I didn’t want to take over other people’s styling… so I’ve left people to write their own header for it and the whole form is in a <div class="supporterForm"> so anyone who wants to style it according to their own design on their site can do so if they’re happy playing with CSS. Anyone fancy rewriting it using Ajax? 🙂

A Lib Dem widget

If you look on the top-right of the side bar on this blog’s home page, you may be able to see a sign-up box for the Lib Dem Supporters network. It’s more or less the same one that we’re using on Ming’s website.

That sign-up box is the world’s first Lib Dem WordPress Widget! 🙂

If you already have widgets installed as part of your WordPress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:

Download the ldsupporters.php.txt file and save it or upload it into your widget plug-ins directory under the name ‘ldsupporters.php’
Go into the ‘Plugins’ area of your WordPress installation and activate the ‘Lib Dem supporters box’ widget.
Go into the ‘Sidebar Widgets’ section of the ‘Presentation’ area of WordPress, and drag your new ‘e-supporters’ widget to the desired location.
Hit ‘Save Changes’

er… that’s it.

If you don’t have widgets installed, head off to Automaticc’s Widgets project page and follow their extremely helpful instructions on how to install widgets and add them to your blog template.

Good luck. All suggestions for new widgets or improvements to this one (which is currently rather primitive) are much appreciated!

Lunching with journalists

Alex Wilcock’s post about how to get covered by Doctor Who magazine reminds me of an enjoyable and long lunch I had with the editor of one of the local weekly papers back in the days that I was a PPC.

Amongst other things, I asked him what I could do to get in the paper more: in essence, how could I make his and my life easier. A lot of these seem blindingly obvious, but not everyone does them:

Understand and work to the paper’s timings. Understand the cycle that the paper works to: when the main stories are decided, when the deadlines are, when the paper gets put to bed. Make sure that you get your stories to the editor in time. Once the basic shape of the paper has been decided (which can be a few days in advance of print deadlines), your story won’t get in unless it’s unusually strong.
Provide a large number of diverse stories. It’s partly a numbers game. An editor is looking for a range of stories to make an entertaining and interesting paper. You can’t guess what other stories they will have and what type of stories he or she will be looking for to fill up their paper. I once worked with an Italian with a rather colourful love life: when I asked him how he managed it, he told me:

My secret is that I just ask more women than anyone else.

It’s a bit like that with stories in the local paper – provide more stories and you’ll increase your hit rate.
Make them relevant to the paper. A local paper generally wants local stories. The more locally relevant and specific the better. Find out if there are any types of coverage that the editor wants to improve – and do what you can to help!
Make your news releases interesting – especially the subject line and first paragraph. Journalists will scan the subject line and first paragraph of your press release to decide whether to do anything with it – so make sure they are good. Try to make it the kind of story you might actually want to read yourself. Provide vivid, brief quotes. If you provide a photograph, make sure it’s good quality.
Make your news release easy to use. Don’t send it as an attachment in Word, send it in open email. If your local paper tends to write 250 word articles, don’t send a 500 word press release. Include all relevant contact details. If you have one, attach a good quality digital photograph – preferably at the original resolution of your digital camera (certainly not reduced or compressed).
Provide advance notice of events. Sounds obvious, but we weren’t doing it. Provide as much advance notice as possible.
Send it to the right person. Find out who does what and send your story or photograph to the right person.

Other things I’ve found to work include:

Piggyback big stories. When you know there’s a big story and you have something interesting to say, it’s worth sending in a press release with a brief quote that they can re-use.
Don’t worry if you think the paper is biased against you. In most cases, your opponents think exactly the same thing. It’s not the job of the local newspaper to be a podium for local politicians.

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