The Spotlight section at the bottom of every page of UnionBook is where you'd go to find out how to use the site -- and now if you look at the lower right corner of every page, you'll see that you can also go directly to the current ActNOW campaigns on LabourStart directly from your page.  This list is automatically refreshed, so it's worth looking there from time to time.

Some of you will be familiar with LabourStart's presence on Twitter - which we can now update automatically simply by posting a public message to The Wire on UnionBook.

If you have a Twitter account, simply login to UnionBook (make sure you have an account here) and click on Settings in the menu on top of the page.  Select Configure your tools and you'll get a page for 'twitterservice'.  Type in your Twitter details there.  That's it.

Now, if you have important short messages you want to share with your fellow trade unionists, the smart way is post them as public messages on The Wire here - meaning they'll appear on our home page, and all UnionBook visitors will see them.  In addition, they'll automatically be on your Twitter page and seen by your followers. 

By posting your union-related tweets here, you automatically reach a wider audience -- so it's a no-brainer.

Enjoy!

(And a big thanks to Nick Holden for sorting out the kinks on this one, and to Marcus for writing the plug-in in the first place.)

We've just added the Flickr widget to UnionBook.  This means that you can display your Flickr photos on your dashboard.  When on your dashboard or profile, use the 'Edit page' link in the upper right corner and drag the Flickr box to where you'd like it to appear.

We've now got a bug reporting mechanism in place on UnionBook.  Feel free to use this to let us know about problems you find here.

Report bugs here.

Thanks!

Over 100 new users, new groups springing up all the time, lots of positive feedback -- it's been a good day.

We're beginning, slowly, the project of internationalizing the site.  Right now, if you click on Settings (on top of your page) you can choose your language (English or French).  We are reviewing this now, and hope to add other languages and make the translations comprehensive where possible.  At the moment, we know that many of the plug-ins (which are not Elgg core) are not translated. 

If you haven't yet done so, please do try out the blogs, the wire, joining groups, and making friends.  And spread the word!

I realize that the 'Day without Facebook' has already begun (at least in that part of the world).  About 177,000 people have signed up for this event with another 185,000 say they may try to have a day without Facebook on 12.12.08 -- so this is as convenient a day as ever to do the "soft launch" of UnionBook.

Starting now.

The final steps needed were to create basic help pages, which can be found at the bottom of every page on the site (in the Spotlight section).  Big thanks to Gisella for writing some key ones.

Some new groups have been created to help us move UnionBook forward -- Techies and Internationalization in particular.  Do check them out (click on Groups) under Tools, above -- or click on Groups on the bottom of the page.

We'll see tomorrow if anyone takes up our offer and signs up to UnionBook.  At the moment we have 35 active users.

At the moment we're redirecting everything to unionbook.org.uk, but within a day or two, we will be natively using the unionbook.org domain name.  What this means is that UnionBook is now free to grow -- and its growth will not conflict with LabourStart, keeping in mind the stupid reaction of our ISP recently when one our campaigns experienced a brief success.  Thanks to Nick Holden who took care of the technical side of this move for us.

While the 'Current status' bit doesn't work for everyone, another Elgg plug-in called The Wire might do the trick.  I've disabled 'Current status' for the moment.  Please do try out The Wire -- add it to your Dashboard using the edit function and post stuff and reply to stuff.

UnionBook, when it goes live, is probably going to be fairly popular.  For that reason, we don't dare continue to run it from the LabourStart server (where it's currently running as http://www.labourstart.org/unionbook).  Instead, we're going to put it on a dedicated server and we've taken a low-end option on a highly-recommended British-based ISP, Memset.  At some point in the next few days, we're going to try to move everything over from 1&1 (where LabourStart is hosted) to Memset.  Best we do this before we have a large base of users, so we'll do it fairly quickly.  Hopefully, there will be only a very limited impact on our service.

I've added several more pages to the list below (see under Spotlight, at the bottom of every page on this site) -- and need more help to write these and to figure out what needs to be written.  Getting the education and training part of this site right is key to success.

A whole bunch of new users have signed up in the last 24 hours and we seem to have 23 active users already on board.  At the international Elgg conference last week in Brighton, one of the speakers talked about his very small install of Elgg and he had only 28 users.  The largest Elgg installation has over 50,000 users -- at the University of Brighton.  (Which shows that the software, properly tweaked, does work.)

Those users have begun to play around -- I've seen files uploaded, profiles configured (with photos), and blogs created.  Where I can, I'm commenting on new content, welcoming people on board, and making the ones I can identify into my friends.  Obviously, I won't be able to sustain this, not when we have hundreds and then thousands of users, but I think it's a good idea for the early adopters.  I'd appreciate others doing the same -- let's be a welcoming community from the very start.