Twin Cities Indymedia

We are about 80% complete converting Twin Cities Indymedia from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.10, which has a variety of excellent new features. Fortunately, perilous database conversions went thru will nary a ripple of terrifying errors. Everyone's logins work as before.


Current issues:

• Until the features & anti-spam arrangements are straightened out, comments and story posting are temporarily restricted. No mood for spammers
• Random features not on :)
• All the Drupal "Views" have been deleted, so your various multi-post pages are not necessarily working. Also the newswires at right have to be created anew. All the data is fine - we just need to put in the new ways to show it
• Various bits of the 'art' of the site are out of place, fonts etc.
• A variety of random items will be moved around
• The 'performance enhancing' caching and other toggles are off. However the site should be a LOT faster under Drupal 6 anyway!!

We have now gained a lot of nice design options (in particular adding more democratic measures like possible voting for features, AJAX, WYSIWYG editor (FINALLY!) etc). These are not in yet.

In any case we had to the tricky conversion stuff before getting into everything else. We will try to get it all online soon &
Thanks for joining us & plz give us a feedback!

--Your busy info bees @ TCIMC Tech Collective

Twin Cities Indymedia / http://twincities.indymedia.org
Contact: IMC Dispatch Line, 651-503-5661
Now On Twitter: http://twitter.com/tcimc
Email: imcATrnc@gmail.com
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL, SEPTEMBER 1ST, 2008

Twin Cities Indymedia to Provide Live Updates from Protestors During Republican National Convention

Hotline & Twitter Dispatch Launched for Up-to-the-Minute Coverage

Twin Cities, MN- As the Republican National Convention launches, the staff of Twin Cities Indymedia and increasing numbers of media activists are prepared to cover the situation.

With the cooperation of many people, we have opened the "Indymedia Lounge" in downtown St. Paul @ 300 Broadway Street, between Kellogg Boulevard and the Farmer's Market, near the Black Dog Cafe in Lowertown.
Please buzz #38 (the building entrance is under scaffolding) and visit with us, share video and find out what is happening across the Twin Cities. Media activists are already there, and will be 24x7 - so please stop by! (The riverfront loft view is excellent!)

This weekend's dramatic police raids against many journalists and activists proved that Indymedia's deep connections to our community can provide a crucial service. TC-IMC was the first to publish complete search warrants served just hours prior - and our brand new Livewire carried the latest news of the raids.
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Messaging & dispatch to events:
People working with TC-IMC can call into our dispatch line to report the news, and we can send out reporters via Twitter (a microblogging service which has turned out to be crucial to monitoring RNC conflicts so far).

Stop by the Indymedia Lounge to provide your contact info and a useful alias for texting, and we can dispatch more reporters to more places at once.

Indymedia has launched a 24-hour Dispatch hotline @ 651-503-5661. The hotline is designed to allow protest participants to call in reports from the streets. A "LiveWire" has been set up on the site to feature these up-to-the-minute updates. The LiveWire can be viewed at http://tc.indymedia.org.

To subscribe your phone to TC-IMC's Twitter feed:
send a txt message to the number 40404 with the message "follow tcimc". Remember to put a space between follow and the group name. (If this is the first time you have used twitter, the system will respond asking for you to send them a message with your user name. Reply to this message with whatever username you want to use. This will now be your user name if you ever log on to the twitter web site.)
To send reports back from the streets from your phone via Twitter: To do this you must be subscribed to tcimc already. You can send a txt message to the number 40404 in the form of "@tcimc "
(More key Twitter feeds for RNC coverage are available via
http://www.tincancollective.org/ and
http://twitter.com/coldsnaplegal
We will also be reachable via IRC, access via the web @ http://chat.indymedia.org/#RNC
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Video, editing and gear

With the excellent support of our friends, we can offer help with editing and releasing video, as well as opportunities to obtain gear to cover the situation. Stop by the space to find out what's available!

We can also help get videos out to the Internet through a variety of ways.
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Background on TC-IMC:

Twin Cities Indymedia is the local branch of a global independent media network founded by various independent and alternative media organizations and activists in 1999 for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle. During the anti-WTO protests, the center acted as a clearinghouse of information for journalists, and provided up-to-the-minute reports, photos, audio and video footage through its website.
The center also produced its own newspaper, as well as hundreds of audio segment transmitted over the web. The Indymedia.org site, which uses a democratic open-publishing system, logged more than 2 million hits, and was featured on America Online, Yahoo, CNN, BBC Online, and numerous other sites.
Through a decentralized and autonomous network, hundreds of media activists setup independent media centers in London, Canada, Mexico City, Prague, Belgium, France, and Italy over the next year. Indymedia has provided coverage of protest actions at all of the major anti-globalization mobilizations of the past decade.

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As always, we rely on the collective help of everyone to make this happen. Plug in for a truly unique media experience today.

--TC-IMC Tech Collective - Movement Media for the Masses
http://twincities.indymedia.org
IMC Dispatch Line, 651-503-5661 - imcATrnc@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/tcimc