Technology – Page 3 – A resurgent Liberal

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!

Strange formatting

Apologies if you’re somewhat disconcerted by the appearance of this blog. The white background has disappeared for some reason.

When I get a spare moment, I’ll wander through the code and see what might have happened. Perhaps it’s time to widgetise my sidebar?

Later:
And widgetise it, I did.

World’s first Liberal podcaster

So who is the world’s first Liberal podcaster?

It’s possible to make a case for Gladstone with his 1888 recording on a wax cylinder for Thomas Edison (and you can understand from this extract of the Gladstone recording on the Liberal Democrat History Group website just how resonant and impressive his voice must have been). However this wasn’t particularly political in intent.

I think there’s a better case for Asquith and Lloyd-George who produced records for HMV in 1909 backing the controversial ‘People’s Budget’ – and are amongst the first politicians in the world to use mechanical reproduction of their voice in order to spread their message more widely – a closer analogy to the practice of podcasting.

It appears that Asquith was recorded on July 20, 1909 (listen to an extract of Asquith’s speech here) and Lloyd-George on July 23, 1909 (listen to an extract of Lloyd George’s speech here) – so Asquith has it by three days.

Reassuring to know that the current review of how we can use the latest technology to strengthen our campaigning versus the other parties is following in a proud Liberal tradition. 🙂

The wonders of widgets

Currently very excited about the wonders of WordPress widgets.

There’s a real opportunity here to make it incredibly easy for party members to build effective campaigning WordPress-based sites.

Indeed, I’ve just taken a break from coding my first political widget to write this blog entry!

Google Calendar supported by Flock Together

After finally working out how to make the maps in Flock Together clickable, I’ve now also added the functionality to put Flock Together events automatically into Google’s newly launched Calendar. [For an example, check out the button at the bottom of this page or try the button below].

Unfortunately, Google don’t appear to support the RSS/xCal feed that I’ve been using for publishing events. They’ve published a fairly simple standard for entering individual events via a single URL (which I’m using), but to enter a series of events it looks like you need to provide an iCal feed or their own format of XML feed.

In a burst of enthusiasm last summer, I put the functionality into Flock Together to publish iCal feeds, but I’m a bit loath to switch it on. iCal feeds (or .ics files) tend to get opened by Outlook on many PCs and, as far as I can recall from when I last tried it, Outlook falls over if you ask it to open more than one event in a single file. It’s also not currently clear whether Google will index external feeds, so, unless there’s an immediate clamour to the contrary, I will wait and see how many people use the Google calendar service via Flock Together before taking things any further.