Mother Jones did their

13th annual review of student activism

It's really hard to get a good sense of student activism as you really are looking at over 2000 universities (to say nothing of the 20,000+ other schools). So it's a tip of the iceberg situation. This time instead of trying to list the top ten activist schools, they went with a humour sample that is funny - but doesn't say so much about the harder movement building work that is going on.

They missed out on SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), partially because the SDS founding conference was after their deadline.

The best release yet. Or so I hope. Fixed some medium-sized bugs.

Download

I've released Activism Network 3.0.3. It's better than the previous version (3.0 release canidate 2).

I encourage people to check it out and provide feedback. I'm going to do a freshmeat.net release soon.

It's the same version running on campusactivism.org - so it's relatively solid.

Comcast is blacklisting our mail server and has done so for the past several months or possibly more. It probably isn't targetted at this site, so much as it is targetted at part or all of Jaguarpc.com (where we are hosted). So it could be any one of thousands of sites hosted on Jaguarpc that sent out spam or email that was perceived to be spam.

This means that people with Comcast email addresses:
1) do not get confirmation emails
2) cannot reset their passwords
3) do not get email newsletters

In general, Comcast users won't get ANY email from this site.

I've been trying to fix this solution for a couple months, but haven't made any progress. Recently I got a phone number for Comcast, so I'm going to try and get the JaguarPC support team to make a call to solve the problem.

Greenpeace has launched their Melt software on
Cool The Planet

The interface is weird. For instance, I type in Philadelphia and it gives me a long list of unlikely cities that I'd live in. I suspect 99% of people who type in Philadelphia, want Philadelphia, PA. The 7000 people in Philadelphia, MS should use a zip code or something.

They'll probably improve the interface and it will be more interesting once people add content.

This article is an excellent resource:
http://www.geeklog.net/article.php/200410120657418

Basically if you want to convert your data to unicode (utf-8), then to preserve your european characters with accents like é à ç, you have to
1) do a mysql dump
2) convert the fields to utf-8 in the table structure (I use utf8_unicode_ci)
3) use a text editor, like EditPad Pro, to convert the mysql dump file into UTF-8.
4) use another text editor, like Textpad, to delete the first three junk characters:
"" You can see these by opening Textpad in binary mode (which is read-only).

Then to delete the junk, open it in Textpad's regular mode. Then delete the first character in the file and re-enter it using the keyboard (This is weird, but it appears to clear the hidden three junk characters). Then open it in Textpad using the "binary" mode to verify that they are gone.

I fixed two bugs in my MySpaceFeed software that caused the output to look bad (unneeded line break, and it would split words in half).

You can get the new version (1.01) at www.myspacefeed.com.

Ok, I'm serious. I mean it. A real release. Mass chaos. Security issues. Error messages galore. Bugs. Struggling at 3am to fix things, because traffic is lower then and less people will notice.

I'm hoping to convert campusactivism.org (and activismnetwork.org) over to Version 3.0 of this software that has been in development for about TWO YEARS.

It will mostly look like activismnetwork.org does now. However there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. For instance I tried to make everything better organized and simpler (ex. the number of MySQL tables will fall from around 70 to around 50). There is better documentation of the code. I've got decent international support which I'm inviting developers to test out by installing the software on their own website. I wrote an installation guide and made it easier to install.

MySpace Feed - uses Magpie to convert RSS feeds into images for use on MySpace, Friendster, and other sites that don't allow you to have RSS feeds.

MySpace Feed
Click on the Download Source Code link at the bottom.

If you are interested in doing changes (which is totally fine with me), please post on the forum so others know about it.

I haven't put so much work into it, because I'm still not sure if that many people are going to use it. However recently a couple people have emailed me to express interest.

I'm working on getting Activism Network software to work for an activist in Turkey. So I'm struggling with

1) Importing the Geonames Table - with UTF-8
I had to re-import the geonames table (that has world cities, with longitudes/latitudes) so that I would preserve the UTF-8 fields. UTF-8 uses 1-3 characters to express each letter and can support almost all of the world's languages. I had a lot of trouble importing data. Finally got it to work using Navicat's import wizard when I split the data into two chunks (otherwise it was only importing 37,000 of the 53,000 rows). Turkey has 53,000 rows in the geonames table - so hopefully most of the small to large cities are in it. It's only 4mb - so the size isn't bad at all if you just need data for one country. By contrast, the entire geonames database is 400mb (with indexes).