Updated Citizens' Press Websites
The Citizens' Press, Leftnews.org, and What's Left have been updated and technologies changed. Read here how you interact with the new services and make sure you do not miss any new posts.
Some tech changes at CPress.org
Welcome to the new CPress.org website!
We will be updating the website as we go with additions and a few changes over the coming weeks based on the feedback we receive.
We have moved Citizens’ Press from it’s long time Plone install to a static website using Hugo making it much more efficient and taking fewer server resources. We have also updated the design to be a cleaner and lighter look – hopefully more modern and easier to navigate as well.
The leftnews.org feeds (the feed of left-wing stuff around the web) has been moved onto a new subdomain at leftnews.cpress.org. This new subsite is now using a bookmarking program called Shaarli making posting easier for our contributors and a little easier for our users.
All of the sites are loaded through Cloudflare giving them some more speed and stability.
We continue to provide all our services without tracking except the basic analytics that Cloudflare provides in number of visitors.
Citizens’ Press – A brief history
Citizens’ Press was started as a print publication and website of original articles and distributed around New Brunswick in support of union organizing drives and anti-free trade protests in the province starting late 2003-2004. It brought together activists involved in local organizing, those interested in left-wing applications of new technology, and leftnews.org. Citizens’ Press Radio was broadcast as a show on the campus community radio station CHSR as an award winning satirical news program based on the posts on Leftnews.org.
Leftnews.org – a service providing links to left-wing news and views from around the web – actually predates Citizens’ Press and started as an email newsletter and then blog of links to left-wing articles back in early 2003. The archived articles are still where they always were and can be found through any internet search engine. However, new posts to leftnews.org will continues as leftnews.cpress.org.
What’s Left is the most recent edition of the email newsletter providing news and analysis to our readers in their inboxes. It is archived on cpress.org.
The goal of Citizens’ Press was to somewhat centralize non-sectarian left-wing activists, their writings, and support organizing efforts. Citizens’ Press developed and deployed the first simultaneous multi-station electronic vote tracking system, distributed vote-pull database, and outreach program used by a national union and/or student organization – that we know of at the time – in 2003. And, we did it for free with open source tools, community supported digital infrastructure, and dedicated activists – like all our services. These web services and organizing tools provided by the Citizens’ Press since 2003 will continue as usual as they continue to support on the ground organizing and outreach efforts of like-minded organizations and activists.
URL Changes
With the updated technology, there are going to be some changes to posting and serving content for our different “brands”.
- Leftnews.org will now be hosted at leftnews.cpress.org
- Citizens’ Press original editorials, policy papers, and news posts will continue to be found on the main site cpress.org.
- What’s Left, our email news letter, will still be sent out and archived at cpress.org/whatsleft
- All the sub-sections of the cpress.org (such as policy notes on social finance, the attack on workers’ rights, and student unions) can be found in the drop-down menu on the top-right of the site.
The different names we give all these “brands” that fall under the Citizens’ Press banner can be a bit confusing, but they are all tied-up with the history of the publication/group/network/random assortment of characters that make up the Citizens’ Press and the people associated with each of them is not uniform across the brands. As such, they will stay separated for the time being.
There continue to be many subscribers to the RSS feeds of Leftnews and CPress and thousands of visitors a month to CPress’ various sites.
For those who use RSS/Atom (and you all should), please update your RSS Feeds:
- Leftnews RSS: https://leftnews.cpress.org/?do=rss
- Leftnews Atom: https://leftnews.cpress.org/?do=atom
- CPress.org RSS: https://cpress.org/index.xml
- What’s Left RSS: https://cpress.org/whatsleft/index.xml
Thank-you for your continued support of Citizens’ Press and please let us know if there are any changes that would make your use of our services better.
Comradely,
Graham Cox