A new set of automatically updated campaign buttons is now available for Liberal Democrat websites.
As I wrote in September, during my time working at party HQ doing online campaigning one of our most successful projects (cooked up with the help of Rob Fenwick and Martin Tod) was the ‘campaign buttons’ – a simple piece of code which let bloggers and those with other websites easily display campaign adverts and news stories from the party.
It was a great way for the party to be able to push out quickly and widely adverts for new campaigns, policy launches and the like, whilst for those running sites it made for some automatically updated and useful content which they did not have to look after.
Since I left, the campaign buttons rather fell out of favour. Although the code is still running, zombie-like continuing to churn through the motions, the buttons themselves have not been updated for an age. As a result they now display a mix of broken images and trips down memory lane, such as the old campaign to encourage people to look up their MP’s voting record on Iraq.
Chatting to people at party HQ, there aren’t any plans to revive them. That’s a shame, although understandable as there is other internet and IT work taking a higher priority.
On my usual basis that regretting other people’s (in)action should be leavened by taking practical action yourself, I’m therefore resurrecting the idea, with the help of coding by the as ever excellent Simon Dickson. The new button feed isn’t an official party service, but it’s available to all to use and I’ll do my best to make it reliable and useful.
It’s primarily outward looking, so the content it will feature is designed to tell the public what the Liberal Democrats have done and why the party should be supported, making it suitable – for example – for local councillor, local campaigners or MP websites.
To add it to your own site, just add the following script in the appropriate location:
<script
type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://libdemwidget.
(For example, if you have a self-hosted WordPress site you can add a widget in an appropriate place and put this code in it.)
You can see an example in action at http://libdemwidget.markpack.
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
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9 Comments
Great stuff Mark. Will these be available for the Prater Raines sites (for those of us who aren’t great with script)?
Jonathan – they already are! We’ve been testing for a while (an original version was placing third party cookies that we didn’t want to support), and have just updated to Mark’s live code (rather than the previous test). You can see an example of it in use on http://www.kentlibdems.org.uk (right hand side, below the Twitter feed).
to add to any page on your Prater Raines site, hit the “Campaigns” button on the editor bar (looks like a megaphone) and select “Sidebar buttons from Mark Pack”. Add, save the page, and enjoy!
When we’ve seen the live script working across a number of sites we’ll promote the buttons to our users directly, but feel free to add now.
We’ve been using your code for some time in our web site http://www.harlow.libdems.org/ (along with a graphic you’ll recognise!), in order to have at least SOME up to date material on it, as nobody was writing any local material for the site. I realise you meant it for a narrow side column, but it would help if we could limit the size the photos or icons grow to when it has more space; they get too big. Also, can we please have the top banner in orange rather than that evil Aqua. Thanks.
I tried this on blogger and it didn’t work. Any tips?
David: Thanks for the ideas. That’s the sort of feedback that’s really useful for when I get to thinking about the first round of changes/improvements (as opposed to currently concentrating on making sure the basics run reliably and properly). Further feedback from others too very welcome!
Caron: Not sure exactly what the problem is. Could you email me more details, both of what you did to try to add them and where on your site I should look to see the result?
Thanks for the help Tim. It’s now up and running on Sarah Teather’s site http://brentlibdems.org.uk/en/
Hi Mark. Of the dazzling array of widgets available on my wordpress site, none of them seem to be appropriate. Could you give me some advice, please?
Max: If you add a text widget you can then copy and paste the code above into it. When you do so, make sure the quote marks come through as straight quotes and not curved or angled ones. Hope that works smoothly for you; if not drop me an email with details of what happens and I’ll happily help further.
The key words here, are ‘the appropriate place’ – how do I know which place on my page is ‘appropriate’?