What a difference TUSC makes

I am really looking forward to the upcoming elections on May 3rd. It’s been several years since I felt anything but frustration or apathy towards the political system and its parties, but being able to support my comrades in the Socialist Party as they stand for election under TUSC changes things, it changes things a lot

I feel excited once more about the possibility of making a difference, and I am looking forward to helping people break away from the notion that all political parties are the same, because they are simply not. Unfortunately a TUSC candidate is not standing this year in my region, but I am very happy to support those who are standing.

We’ve waited long enough for a real alternative, now lets strengthen it by voting for TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and announce our support for a real alternative to the big three parties and the only representative body in the race who are prepared to stand up and fight against all cuts. You can find election leaflets for some of the Yorkshire Socialist Party candidates on the Wakefield & Pontefract branch website.

My First Socialist Party Conference

I’ve just got back from town, having attended my first conference with the Socialist Party. The regional level conference ran over the weekend, and involved representatives from all of the branch’s within the region, including but not limited to; Halifax, Leeds, Rotherham, Wakefield and York. The first day of the event focussed more on political discussions after a lead-in from a guest speaker, today had more of a focus on practical matters.

Both sessions where educational, interesting and I’m very glad I was able to attend. I don’t know if it was planned or simply a coincidence but I believe next week is the National Conference for the Youth Fight for Jobs & Education “campaign” and soon after that the Socialist Party will be holding their national conference, so it’s a really good thing I got a taste for things over this weekend, to dispel any nervousness I met have felt about attending the larger events. I didn’t speak in front of the session as a whole on either day, but did contribute to discussions, especially concerning the branch websites and social media which was discussed at some length today. Hopefully I will now feel more able to address the room or a larger audience at future events after my experience this weekend.

I’ve had a few days of focussing on this site and other things now, so I’ll now need to re-double my efforts on the Wakefield Branch website. Most of the structure is in place, at least for a first interaction of the site, it’s mostly lacking content, and as our branch is smaller than some, it may mean that I have to step up regarding writing and producing content as well as doing the more administrative side of the website.

Website for Wakefield Socialist Party

I had a rather busy night last night, well more accurately a very busy morning as it was probably around midnight by the time I got started, and it wasn’t until around 6am when I felt too tired to do any more, although I kept trying. The mission I tasked myself with was to set up a website for my branch of the Socialist Party, which I joined whilst with Occupy Leeds, as outlined on my About page. Being camped in Leeds for a number of weeks with Occupy Leeds, I was a little more aware of the Leeds branch, they also seemed to be more active on the web front, with a website already up and running as well as Twitter and Facebook pages. Seeing an example of what seemed to be missing from my own branch empowered me with realising I could give something to support the Wakefield Socialist Party, so after a few e-mails to ensure I wasn’t stepping on anyone’s toes, I got to work, and the new website was born.

I’ll outline for you what got achieved during that period, and what the next step will be, including what I hope to tackle today. The website was setup on the WordPress.com platform, I chose this for two key reasons, the first being it was free, and the second is that I am most familiar with WordPress based websites, so I knew I could get something setup a functioning without too much hassle. The immediate step was to go through the settings and perform a few tweaks, set up a static home page, and after deciding on a theme, creating a new custom menu. The current theme supports two menus, the primary menu is set up for site navigation and currently features the Home page, About page a Join / Contact page and a News page. The secondary menu will probably be used for displaying some key categories prominently at the top of the page, I have left this menu empty for the time being until the categories are established and sufficiently populated with entries.

The next phase would have me traversing backwards and forwards between the website, Facebook, Twitter and Gmail as I created new accounts to be used in conjunction with the website, allowing the branch’s Twitter feeds to be displayed in the side panel, and a like box for Facebook to be set up. Having done that, I spent some time on both the Facebook page and the Twitter profiles, adding the Socialist Party logo and filling in some basic information. Thankfully the basic information was already present on a Facebook group, which made it a simple copy and paste. In addition I sought out some appropriate people to follow on Twitter and then uploaded a map and a photo showing the usual location of our branch meetings to the Facebook page.

Having already used the contact form on the national Socialist Party website to request help on the direction I would like to move towards regarding branch websites, the only thing left to do was add some link categories, and modify the default Hello World! post to something a little more appropriate.

Looking ahead, today I would like to focus on the Join / Contact page, I will probably do a similar design to that used on the national Socialist Party website and use a “page within page” structure, utilising contact forms for requesting user information. Longer term I would like to mirror more of the appearance and functionality of the national website, and do so on a private domain. Ideally I see this being developed to a degree that it can be used as a template for other branch’s who don’t yet have their own website, or who would like to follow suit, becoming more consistent with the theme of the national site.