"The Physical Impossibility Of v3.2 In The Mind Of Someone Running v2.8"

WordPress is as any fule kno, about three or four of the seven wonders of the Internet. It’s a remarkably elegant and flexible website platform that puts enormous publishing power into the hands of people without any particular coding skills to speak of. As a definite member of this low-talent group, I find it hard to speak too highly of it.

However, like all good things, it’s very easy to binge on it and regret it later. You can throw up impressive, interactive blogs and sites for anything, extremely quickly – any short term project, event or campaign – and soon find you’ve got a dozen defunct CMS-driven websites on your hands.

Often you want to keep the content of these sites, as it’s useful to have as an archive, you’ve got a sentimental attachment to them, or at least they’re not harmful and give a bunch of people a teaspoon of Googlejuice. The problem is that CMSs move on all the time. WordPress drops another incremental version every now and then, adding lovely new features and fixing bugs, but also addressing security vulnerabilities.

Get too far behind, and you may find yourself with a site that’s swiss cheese for hackers, using your hard written content to push Viagra or phish for others’ personal data. You web host is unlikely to take kindly to this abuse of their servers too, and it’s an all round hassle you’d be far better off without.

The problem is that keeping  your dozen defunct sites up to date in perpetuity, when you’ve no longer any intention of updating the content ever again, is also a hassle you could do without.

I’ve had this problem recently, and have set out on a program of killing off a number of old blogs or sites for defunct but still interesting projects. I basically wanted a way to render a site unhackable, which would mean deactivating the site admin tools and database, and converting the whole thing into hard-to-mess-with flat file HTML.

I’d hoped there might be a plugin for this (there’s one for pretty much everything else), but didn’t manage to find it, so with a colleague, we came up with our own 7 step plan. I admit this is of pretty specialist interest, but I guess if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably got the same problem, and may find this useful too:

1. Get hold of an offline browser program. I like Maximumsoft WebCopier. This can be set to crawl a whole website, saving a local copy of each page with the same relative file structure as the site, and copies of all static resources such as images or stylesheets.
2. Tweak your WordPress theme’s header.php, so you can add a banner at the top of every page, explaining the site is no longer actively maintained, and is being kept as an archive, so you shouldn’t be surprised if content’s out of date, or links no longer work. If you want to be very clever, you could even do this via an iframe, so editing it in one place in future will change the banner on all pages.
3. Take out locally hosted search functions, or other pieces of interactivity that wouldn’t work if saved as static files. Remove contact forms and switch off new comment permissions across the site, so you don’t disappoint people who wanted to respond but now can’t.
4. Run WebCopier on the site, saving every page the spider can find onto your hard drive.
5. Make a subdomain or subfolder for your site, and upload the offline site copy there. Have a quick poke around to check it’s all still linked okay.
6. When it’s okay, switch the main domain to point at the subdomain folder or the subfolder holding the static site.
7. Delete the WordPress files and remove the MySQL database.

And presto, you have one mothballed website, still all there, still with incoming links intact, but now proof against hacking or other unpleasantries.

A rather drastic solution sure (you can obviously not go back to running it by CMS again), but one that might save you a lot of grief repairing hacker damage on an old site you didn’t plan to do much with anyway.

(Of course, for completeness sake, there’s a less drastic alternative you could be factoring in from the start, by using the MultiUser functionality of WordPress to run loads of sites off one installation, meaning you need only ever keep the one central system updated. It’s not always an option though, as it restricts your freedoms around user accounts and plugins used on different sites. Plus it requires a degree of planning, which is not always my strong suit.)

The first I saw was Unite AGS Tony Burke, who has started adding regular guest posts to the Print Week blog, as a sub-blog called Unite Viewpoint. Tony is in charge of the Unite print workers’ section, and this is a great fit – getting the union’s comment right into a paper which will be closely followed by Tony’s members, and much more importantly by workers in the industry who aren’t yet members of the union.

And thanks to a helpful comment she left on ToUChstone blog, I recently noticed UNISON head of local government Heather Wakefield’s own blog as part of Public Finance magazine’s group blog. She has written some great articles that will be of a lot of interest to local government administration, positioning her as a recognisable expert with many potential members and other key people around her sector. UCU officer Stephen Court has also joined her on PF blog with a monthly article which gets combined into the wider blog.

The trade press are busily trying to build their online presence, and for many publications, this means instituting a blog as a way of adding more topical content and getting more direct contact with their readership through commenting. Offering help with this by contributing regular articles from the union’s unique perspective should be pretty attractive prospect to them as well as to you (don’t worry it’s not taking union journalists’ jobs. There’s no column inch limit to a blog, and in the current miserable climate for the media, helping boost the publication’s revenue very slightly through online ads is doing them a favour!).

Unions have written bylines for the trade press for many years, and it could be seen as a bit of a climb down to write specifically for a blog, which will (at least for the moment) have a smaller readership than the print magazine itself. I think you need to try both though. You can get more regular content in a blog format – you’ll only be allowed a magazine byline every now and then, and certainly not more often than the magazine is published – plus you’ll be stored on the site and searchable for much much longer. The implicit endorsement of the union as a serious player through inclusion on the magazine’s site could be valuable in impressing potential members that the union is a good step to professional development.

The same might hold for local media, where a Trades Council or union regional official might be a great addition to the blog team of that paper’s own blog – getting the union better known in the community.

If the blog you write for has an individual feed (as both these examples do), you could even integrate it onto the union’s site, Twitter feed or other channels in some way – building even more positive links with that publication, and a better working relationship for the other ways they cover your union.

So for those who don’t know whether they should set up a blog for their union at the moment, why not consider borrowing one instead?

If you’re involved in trade unions, you’re likely hearing a new buzzword right now: “Just Transition”. My guess is that if you’re like me, the frequent repetition of this neologism doesn’t help clarify anything whatsoever, but it’s worth sticking with, as it’s an interesting concept, and one where unions may really be able to make a contribution.

Climate change is the biggest issue facing the entire population of the planet right now, and if we’re to have any effect at all in tackling it, our actions will need to result in a fundamental shift in the ways we live and work.

Previous times we’ve had these kinds of periods of economic restructuring, they’ve not been planned through, and the burden of change has fallen hardest on people and communities already at a disadvantage. Many areas of the UK are still suffering the effects of the move from manufacturing in the 80′s.

If we wanted a “Just Transition” to the new, low carbon economy, we’d seek to minimise the social costs of the change – within our own national economies and internationally.

This could be done through a stronger focus on consultation with those affected by change, through work in building green skills, so people could move more easily to the new opportunities, and active investment in green and decent jobs – not just creating jobs in low carbon industry, but ensuring they’re good, safe jobs that people will value.

There’s a moral case for this, which doesn’t really need to be pointed out to trade unionists, but if the transition isn’t “Just”, then it’ll be that much less likely to work. We need to accomplish this shift quickly and comprehensively. It needs everyone’s active buy-in for it to work in the short time frame we have available to us.

And, not to jinx anything, but it looks like it might have a shot at working. Unions around the world have been working together on this, lobbying their own governments in the run up to the crucial Copenhagen climate conference, where we’ll get an agreement on action on climate change – good or bad.

The concept of “Just Transition” has been lobbied, cajoled and coaxed over the course of this year, right into the very negotiating texts that are up for discussion at Copenhagen. Our leaders will be discussing a serious plan for making this change in the fairest and most effective way, and it will be thanks to unions that it got there.

For more reading on Just Transition from a UK perspective, check out Hazards Magazine and the TUC ToUChstone pamphlet “A Green and Fair Future“.

BTW… Blog Action Day today on the theme of climate change, hence this post. In the UK, we have another 2 whole hours of it left, so if you have a blog, join in at www.blogactionday.org, and if you’re on Twitter, check out the hashtag #BAD09

Union and political blogs in the USA continue to point the way, with insider commentary from LaborNerd, effective online campaigning from SEIU blog, or comprehensive and timely labour movement coverage from AFL-CIOnow. But things are growing over here too.

René Lavanchy’s blog offers unique insights into the UK labour movement, and more official national union blogs have been launched, with sites like PCS Comment or Stronger Unions trying to engage more closely with the membership. Policy blogs ToUChstone and Connected Research have joined more established ones like Labour and Capital to reach out beyond the movement and represent union ideas to the wider policy blogging community.

2009 has also seen blogs used to co-ordinate campaigns and disputes, with the excellent work done by the Keep Burberry British blog last year being continued by activists involved in the Vestas dispute on the Isle of Wight, and the Save 600 Jobs at Vestas blog has been the most heavily updated on the whole network.

More blogs are also being used to help network local union organisations. Port of Felixstowe Unite, PCS Euston Branch and Barnet UNISON, amongst others are becoming established and useful presences online for their respective branches.

Blogs have also helped give an extra dimension to union election campaigns, with all the candidates in the recent Unite Amicus JGS election fielding commentable online communications for the first time.

And the range of tools used has increased too. The international volunteer network LabourStart have launched UnionBook.org, a union specific social network, offering powerful networking tools free to union organisers (a safer option for many than the major networks like Facebook, which have banned

individual union activists or terminated campaigns in recent years). UnionBook has a blogging tool, integrated within their supportive community, and already two of its bloggers are represented on TIGMOO.co.uk.

Twitter has also burst onto the blogging scene in a bigger way, with UK politicians keenly taking up the opportunities to report back to constituents or to crowdsource opinion with this fashionable microblogging service. Unions are now starting to make use of Twitter to make contact with members too.

@NUSuk, @WorkersUniting, @EquityUK, @UnitetheUnion, @UNISONtweets, @LabourStart and others have already amassed creditable levels of followers. And an international union Twibe at twibes.com/union collates trade union Twitter accounts in a similar way to TIGMOO.co.uk.

We’ve also seen the TIGMOO.co.uk union blog aggregator model extended to Canada with the launch of the new site UnionBlogs.ca, and word is that a US version is now in the pipeline. Who knows, next year could see us go international – Bloggers of the world, unite!

Note: Article republished from TIGMOO.co.uk guide to union blogging 2009, after some helpful comments on not hiding it away in a pdf – apologies to anyone who read it already!

Who has the top spot this year? I can tell you that this here blog has slumped down the rankings a few places (sob), and that a third of the top 25 are new entries since last year, so there’s a lot to be looking out for.