Liberal Democrats: Flock Together

There’s been an encouraging uptake of the personal RSS feed system that I’ve just installed - 37 different people so far.

My feed is http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/userrss.php?id=mpntod for example. Just change the user name on the end (the bit in italics) to get your own personal feed. If you log in to the site, the RSS icon at the bottom of the home page should also link to your personal feed.

I had a request for the feed to be sortable by date by using use the date of the meeting as the publication date. This may confuse your feed reader since some of them don’t show dates in the future, and it will mean that updates don’t show as you might expect, but if you want this, add ‘&scheduleddate=yes‘ to the end of your feed address.

I am also thinking of adding a ‘&praterraines=yes‘ flag to format the entries so that they look good on Prater Raines sites. In essence, this will mean removing the date from the meeting title and changing the publication date to the date of the meeting. Worth doing? Let me know.

Postnote: the ‘praterraines’ flag is now installed and working.

Do you run a Lib Dem organisation or local party?

If you’ve added any meetings for a particular organisation to Flock Together, you can now edit the details of that organisation.

Just go to the organisation page in question and hit the ‘edit this page’ link.

Many thanks to Mike Williams for his Google Maps API Version 2 Tutorial on fitting a map to data.

This has enabled me to add rather nifty maps on Flock Together to various organisation pages that automatically zoom in to fit all the meetings for an organisation snugly on the map without needing to zoom out to cover the whole of the British Isles (my earlier approach).

You can see an example on the Liberal Drinks page or the Newbury Liberal Democrats or North West Hampshire Liberal Democrats pages.

I finally did a few quick fixes to allow meetings to be deleted on Flock Together.

Historically, there were only two options: active and cancelled. But sometimes people make a mistake and enter a meeting twice, and in this case the meeting shouldn’t be shown as cancelled, but rather needs to be deleted.

The difference between ‘cancelled’ and ‘deleted’ is as follows:

Cancelled

Meeting details continue to be shown in the system and are sent out to people in the regular emails with a reminder that the meeting has been cancelled.

Deleted

Meeting details are not shown and are not sent out to people via email. It is still possible for the meeting creator or an administrator to edit the meeting.

Since ‘deleted’ is a flag on a meeting record, it is possible to undelete a meeting if you accidentally delete it.

Share and Enjoy:

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Here, as an experiment, is a video which explains how you can add a meeting to the Flock Together site.

My first shot at this was full screen throughout and quite hard to follow. The original footage came from CamStudio. After looking at the rough cut, I then did quite a bit of work with the positioning and magnification functions in Adobe Premiere Elements to try to get closer to the action and make it clearer.

Seeing it after it’s gone through the Google Video system, it’s improved, but could probably still be zoomed ever further in than it is. I’ll also look into displaying the original Windows video file to let people have higher resolution.

Was this worth doing? Should I do any more? Any thoughts as to what trainings I should do and how they could be better than this one? Comments, thoughts and ideas most welcome.

So why has Flock Together joined the blogosphere?

Partly because there seem to be enough things going on on Flock Together to justify a few comments, and partly because I wanted to enrich the site content a bit.

I’ll be using this blog to post news about Flock Together and also highlight any interesting things that people are doing with it.

At this point, you probably expected a post about Liberal Drinks, but I’ve already done that elsewhere.

No. This first post was triggered by another obsession of the Lib Dem blogosphere, namely Doctor Who.

Lib Dem campaigners in Cardiff have had the inspired idea of a Doctor Who-themed action weekend on September 9th and 10th, and, encouragingly, they’ve posted it on Flock Together.

I would not be surprised to see at least some of the Lib Dem blogosphere in attendance.