Just for your info/entertainment, by-election pages now show ward/constituency boundaries.
Check out this example from St Paul’s ward, Winchester.
They also now show up if you share a page on Facebook (also from St Paul’s).
You may have noticed that Flock Together now includes a Tweet Button like this one:
in the top right hand corner of each event page.
Let me know what you think.
I’ve been playing with the Facebook Social Plugins to see if they can add any useful functionality to Flock Together.
I’ve added the Like Button and Activity Feed through most of the site, and added the Comments to the blog.
So far, it’s intriguing. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of impact it has in terms of usage and interaction with the Flock Together site and attendance at Flock Together events…
A quick piece of new functionality in the way Flock Together uses Twitter:
If you look at this tweet and click on the word ‘here’, it will show a map with the location of the Flock Together event referred to in the text.
In essence, the tweet now has a location associated with it. This means it will appear in searches for tweets near to a particular location.
The interesting question now is where we go from here. The next priority for FlockTogether is a dramatically improved interface. But I think there are plenty of opportunities for further integration of FlockTogether and Twitter. Ideas include:
Any other ideas? Please let me know.
floc.to - the Flock Together URL shortener - now supports the names of local parties (as seen on your party’s page on Flock Together).
So http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/winchester can now be shortened to http://floc.to/winchester.
You may have noticed Flock Together is using a new URL shortener in its Twitter posts.
For example, if you enter floc.to/6030 in your browser, it will expand to http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/event/6030.
It also works with local parties as well (although you need to know its number). For example, if you enter floc.to/p632, it will expand to http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/winchester.
I’ve also expanded it the party’s survey site, Liberty Research. Enter floc.to/s742 or floc.to/survey/742 to link to http://survey.libdems.org.uk/take/742
Should save space in Focus leaflets if nothing else!
It’s either a flash of genius, or it will make no difference at all, but I think I may have fixed the input page problem by the simple step of telling Flock Together not to display the right hand column on the ‘add meeting’ page.
If you’re logged in, you can create a meeting here and create a by-election here.
Good news from our hosting supplier - 1&1.
They’ve just announced that they’ve moved to green hosting using 100% renewable energy.
If you follow the Flock Together Twitter feed, you may have noticed that it now uses people’s Twitter name (e.g. @flocktogether instead of ‘Flock Together’) in its reports of new events.
Nothing too clever going on (apart from some Ajax-y and Javascript-y stuff on the input pages). Users now have the option to record their Twitter ID on Flock Together when they register or if they visit the Flock Together Twitter page.
Once this done, Flock Together does everything else automatically.
I’ve moved the LibDig plugin to the official Wordpress.org plug-in hosting set-up.
One immediate benefit is that the plug-in can be automatically be upgraded if I (or anyone else) upgrades it.
Your personal feed