The Observer, 3rd May 2009

Just recently I have been busy setting up a new web site for Horsham Labour Party, with a final push to make it go live on May 1st. As anybody can see it is a blogspot site.  It is not really a blog though – it just uses that framework: comments are disabled for a start.  The advantage of using Blogger is that you can have people post articles without having to teach them HTML or anything.  Having got very used to Wordpress now I found it very strange going back to Blogger.

We thought about registering a domain like Crawley Labour Party have for their new site, but I think the Horsham membership wanted to wait and see how it went before actually spending any money.  In fact you can do an awful lot online for free these days.  I am still tempted to just go and register a domain, fork out for a cheap hosting package and install Wordpress – or even experiment with Drupal or Joomla.  Maybe even a wiki or bulletin board to go with it…

The real difficulty now is letting go.  The idea was that I would re-learn how to play with Blogger templates, create a template, tweak all the layout, tweak the style sheet etc. and then hand it over for the members to create articles.  Now its done I feel all parental towards it.

I’m sure that when more people start posting I will keep going in to sub-edit their posts for style and layout.  It will be a real effort to resist fiddling with it.

The launch date was very fortuitous though.  Apart from being a notable day in the socialist calendar, it was just in time for us to publish our list of county council candidates (and Horsham are very proud of puttnig a candidate in every division and getting all the nomination papers in early!), and the day it went live the local paper had 5 letters published that were hostile to the Horsham MP, Francis Maude and his parliamentary expenses habit.

Two days later and Maude was all over the Observer with a story about his business interests, so there has been plenty to write about!

I find myself wishing that Maude would just stop being greedy and hypocritical for a week or two, or at least stop getting caught out, so I didn’t feel obligated to keep responding.

In the meantime if anybody fancies putting gratuitous links to http://horsham-labour.blogspot.com on their own blogs or websites so that it appears on Google search instead of the old, moribund site do feel free.