22.05.2014
From the web team
The CPGB's techies introduce our paper's new website
The Weekly Worker is a print publication, first and foremost. The rhythm of the editorial process is based on the print cycle. Still, it’s a statistical near certainty that you’re reading this on the web. This paper has been available on the web for over a decade and a half; and has thereby reached an audience many times larger and more cosmopolitan than the print run. The web has been unkind to the print industry as a whole, but good to us.
Today, we’re launching the Weekly Worker’s latest web incarnation - and there’s a lot of ‘firsts’ here. For the first time, the WW is on its own website (update your bookmarks, if you haven’t already, to http://weeklyworker.co.uk). Now that more web traffic goes through mobile devices than from ‘old-fashioned’ computers, our readers will benefit from a fully responsive, mobile-first design (trust us - such designs are hard).
It’s not the only way we, the Weekly Worker’s in house geek squad, have tried to bring our use of technology up to date. The first web pages we put up - back in the 90s - were old-fashioned, static HTML pages. We then had a temporary stop-gap content management system (CMS), which ended up lasting years too long. Eventually, we replaced that with the current CPGB site, based on a more sophisticated open-source CMS. It’s served its purpose well enough, but we’ve had far too many crashes and slow page-loads for anyone’s liking.
So this new one, under the hood, has been rewritten completely, using the excellent Django web framework.1 In addition to its general stability and all-round awesomeness, Django is appropriately written in Python - a programming language named after the comedy troupe that gave us the Judean People’s Front. Weekly Worker readers surely expect nothing less.
A final change is maybe the most significant. Henceforth, all Weekly Worker content is released under a ‘copyleft’ licence - to be precise, the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence.2 This explicitly licenses allcomers to republish, in whatever form you like, any articles, as long as you make the source clear - except for commercial purposes. In practice, we have hardly been the most aggressive defenders of copyright down the years, in line with our political opposition to ‘intellectual property’ laws. We are making this explicit, however, to make a point - that communists ought to have no truck with IP, and should be quite clear about this, now that the internet age has propelled this fine legal point unavoidablly into high politics.
Think
Beyond speeding things up, hitting multiple device formats and replacing a previous design that, with hindsight, we must concede was too red by half, hitting the usual array of website ‘best practices’ is a slightly complicated matter for something like the Weekly Worker. It is not like there is no material out there on how to develop a website’s audience. Indeed, there has emerged a distinct body of pseudo-science and consultancy hoodoo called ‘user experience’ (UX), to solve precisely this problem for organisations of various kinds.
The user in ‘user experience’, however, is a most peculiar abstraction, best summed up in the title of Steve Krug’s influential UX book, Don’t make me think! User experience is measured above all in ‘conversions’ - people whose interest in a web page transfers, ultimately, into a purchase. UX ‘users’ are consumers - and from this perspective thinking just gets in the way. Amazon and the like don’t want you to think. Charities upholding the latest worthy cause, in terms of a low, low monthly donation, don’t want you to think either.
And unfortunately this attitude is reproduced by our competitors on the left. At the time of writing, the Socialist Worker home page has two shouty headlines about, respectively, the depredations of the Con-Dem government and the ‘racism’ of Ukip; and two more blowing up incidental strikes into events of epochal significance. They want to direct their ‘users’, as frictionlessly as possible, into the hollow pseudo-activity that the Socialist Workers Party has made its own over the decades. It is just as manipulative as the UX gurus increasing conversion rates for Amazon, albeit not altogether as competent. Get the workers to fight - don’t make them think!
Curry
Indeed, you could say that there’s something manipulative about the very nature of the web. This is how it works:
It’s Friday night. And on Friday nights you go for a curry. You are seated at the table. The waiter patiently takes one of those enormously complicated curry-house orders. Then he disappears into the kitchen. Sooner or later, he turns up again, with all the mains and sides.
You do not know what goes on in the kitchen; whether your vindaloo is a work of exquisite culinary craftsmanship, or if the ingredients are taking the shortest possible route from the freezer, to the microwave, to your mouth. (If your favoured tandoori palace is as lovably ramshackle as ours, you probably don’t want to know.) All you know is: you ask for something. Something odd happens in a mysterious black box, and then you get what you asked for (unless something goes wrong, and you get something else).
That is the basic cycle of the web. Every time you type an address into the bar, or click on a link, you make a request - like picking something off a menu. Incomprehensible magic happens, and after a time delay, you get a response. Request, response, request, response - such is the great, unending Friday night curry of the web.
The task of making sure everybody gets their order, in a timely fashion, falls to us - the world’s web developers and designers. Sad to say, our establishment is definitely a freezer-to-microwave sort of place. So many people, demanding so many things!
So we cheat. We rig things up to cobble together a response and send it back to you without direct human intervention, that will reach into all kinds of sources, and reuse everything that can be reused as often as possible. It’s an enormous act of prestidigitation and, like all such trickery, it is successful inasmuch as it goes unnoticed by the uninitiated.
And that’s our fondest hope for the new website - that the medium goes almost unnoticed, leaving more cognitive room for the message. That’s why we want it to scale nicely to all screens, and why we want it to zip along, and - indeed - why the new colour scheme is less Dario Argento and more Le Corbusier. We hope you find the new website just as engaging, serious, provocative and infuriating as the Weekly Worker always has been; that we make you angry, make you laugh - and above all make you think.