One of the issues that many of us face is that its difficult to find time to update our sites regularly week in week out - particularly through some of the 'quieter' periods of the electoral cycle. 

To help with this, we have created an "ALDC News Feed" which will supply a 'national' story (i.e. UK wide), roughly once a week, on your site. This is OPTIONAL - the detault will be to that people have this as part of their site, but you can choose to turn it off. This national story will be mixed with the local content that you produce yourself in date order. 

Here's an example of a site that is running the ALDC news feed (and nothing else).

The feed will try to be of general interest to all areas. We would really like to support a couple of people who would be willing to produce Wales and Scotland versions of the "feed" - any volunteers please don't hesitate to get in touch with Tim in the office. 

Other "feeds" could be developed over time - there has already been talk of a London news feed!

The feed is being turned on on Thursday. 

It is our plan to turn ON the feed for all myCouncillor sites on Thursday. If you want to turn it on yourself now, or if you want to turn it off after Thursday, then...

In the dashboard go to "Tools", "RSS" and edit tick or untick the "ALDC Posts" option and press SAVE. 

Advanced Users Only....

The RSS facility also provides for more flexibility to choose the content of individual sites. 

• Ward and Area level posts. At present all sites receive content from Ward and Area levels of postings - some people use this to share content accoss sites, but it could be that some sites want to "opt out" of one or both. 
• Adding your own feeds. You can add your own feeds to your myCouncillor system - basically any RSS feed in the world. You might want to use this to syndicate content across a number of sites, or bring in content from Lib Dem websites that aren't in the myCouncillor system. In Bury we use this to syndicate press releases across a number of websites from a Tumblr blog.
• Snippets - You can choose to have all posts as "snippets" - a short piece of text, with a link to "read more".

Notes:

This is a new facility, so we'll learn more as we go along. Your site speed will depend on the speed of any RSS feeds you are importing. We tried importing a Posterous blog, but it made the MyCouncillor sites so slow as to be unworkable. Tumblr worked fine, but we have not tried other platforms like Blogger, self hosted Wordpress or Prater Raines. Let us know how you get on!

"Sidebar 1" is the part of your myCouncillor site which traditionally has your picture at the top. (In older themes on the right, in more modern themes its the column in the middle).

We have been asked for more flexibility in this area, particularly for people who have 'ward sites' that involve more than one councillor. The "about me" box provides this flexibility.

In Sidebar 1 you have a number of options:

• the traditional option of having your picture, address and contact details (this is now optional)

• a flexibile "about me" box underneath your address. You can use this however you like - some details about yourself, or more advanced users could put additional photos or anything else that websites will allow. Used without the traditional address details this would be a great way of listing details of all the ward team.

• your twitter feed (see this separate article).

For an example of a site which has an "about me" box as a welcome to their stie see Wilf Davison's site (we've also added in a Fairer Votes button, just as an example of what else can be put in. 

This site uses the "about me" box, with the photo, name and contact details left empty.

This site uses a Twitter feed instead of the about me box.

To edit the "about me" box. In your dashboard go to

"TOOLS"

"ALDC"

Just underneath your name and address is an "edit" button - click here. You can add text, links, or website code. 

You can have BOTH the "About Me" box and the Twitter Feed - the latter just appears below the other. 

Show Twitter on your MyCouncillor site

A new feature in MyCouncillor is the ability to add your "twitter" feed to your myCouncillor site easily. 

See it in action on Tim Pickstone's site here. (in the middle column). 

If you are using Twitter, it is easy to do this for your site too:

On the "Dashboard" (when you have logged in):

On the left hand side click on: "TOOLS", then "TWITTER" (at the bottom). 

Click on the link - you'll be asked for your Twitter username, and your Twitter password. 

And you're done!

Automatically Tweeting your MyCouncillor Stories

You may wish to link your Twitter feed to your MyCouncillor in the other direction. This means that a each time your write a new article on your MyCouncillor site this is "Tweeted" by Twitter!

You need to use a simple (and free) third party application for this called Twitterfeed. 

Register at www.twitterfeed.com

When you're asked to put the "feed" in for your MyCouncillor site copy it needs to look something like this:

Read more & comment...

Google Analytics is a powerful tool which enables you to monitor how many people are looking at your website. 

It is significantly more powerful than the "Hits" and "HIts Mk 2" facilities that we've been using on MyCouncillor since the system began. 

Google Analyitics not only allows you to see how many people are looking at your site, but also at which pages, how they came to your sites (e.g. following a link, or from a google search), and how long they spend looking at each page!

And its free!

We have enabled Google Analyitics to work on your MyCouncillor site - here's how to set it up:

Read more & comment...

The new version of WordPress (WordPress 3) is now being used as the system which operates the myCouncillor websites. 

The "Dashboard" - what you see when you log into your site to edit it - looks a bit different, and a bit more up to date. 

Hopefully most of this is pretty straightforward for people - the buttons that you see down the left of the dashboard are shown here: 

• - posts - for creating a new story on your site (or editing an existing one)
• - media - for managing pictures (or now other files) which you have uploaded to your site: 
• - links - to manage the links that you show in your website side bar
• - pages - to manage the extra pages that you've set up on your website 
• - comments - to approve, reject or mark as "spam" comments that you get on your site
• - appearance - to change the look of your website
• - tools - all the extra things that are just for for the myCouncillor sites are in here - Local Information, the Graph, Surveys etc. There are NEW features in here, which we're going to be telling you about over the coming weeks!

Please be a little careful with the tiny arrow which appears just about "posts" on the left - if you click on that your dashboard reduces to a thin column of just icons, with no words - to get the words back you just click on the tiny arrow again! 

Please ignore the "profile" section - we don't use it on the myCouncillor system. 

Please note that to see your website from the dashboard - click on your name at the top of the page - its not that obvious!

New Features when creating a new story

When you're creating a new story there are a number of new buttons which hopefully you'll find useful (see below): 

• Picture Button - can you see the "picture" just to the right of the words Upload/Insert? This is where you add pictures to your website. This is a hugely improved way for adding pictures (or files like word or PDF documents with the media button (the "star") to your story. Its significantly improved on before and allows you to alter the sizes of pictures more easily. We'll be doing a separate posting to help you with the detail of this shortly, but it is very easy to have a go. Please remember that if the picture you want is ALREADY on the internet, you don't have to upload it again (just just add media "from URL"). 
• Show the kitchen sink (!) - the LAST button on the right is called "kitchen sink" - press it an all the buttons on the bottom row appear!
• A really useful new feature is "Paste From Word" (the clipboard with a "W" on the bottom row) - if you're copying a story from a word document, then sometimes its full of strage fonts and formatting that spoil the look of your website - click on "past from word" and you remove the worst of this!