Sorry about that. Basically, it’s been hectic and I don’t want to write about some of the things that have been going on between the co-op and its clients (nothing bad for our co-op, don’t worry!), but I’ve one tip and one request which I’d like to write about now.

The tip: make disaster recovery plans! Have both a general set of principles and specific plans for any mission-critical services.

Think about reasonably common sources of problems and try to set policies to minimise the risk.

For example, would unauthorised access to your social media accounts be a problem? If so, teach your workers not to enter their usernames and passwords into sites linked from direct messages, like in the latest example.

For another example, do your workers have authentication details for your key servers? Plan what you will do about those passwords if a worker vanishes for a few days without warning after an argument at work.

The request: I’m meeting North Somerset Enterprise Agency about cooperatives and local strategic partnership representation – does anyone have tips or advice about this, please? If so, please leave me comments.

You may remember from posts such as Reject the Term Extension Directive and Improved Telecom Package Passed by EuroParl that MEPs can influence FOSS laws in many ways, because a lot of our copyright and patent laws are international now. Last time around, I compiled euroVote: copyright and patents but I’ve not had time this year. Thankfully, others have summarised them.

Mote Prime: Technology: Letter to MEPs on Software Patents Legislation summarises positions on the old swpat chestnut. European Parliament elections, the Green Party and free stuff By tom introduces the Green position. VOTE 2009: Spot the difference – Lib Dem “shocked and angered” special: The Bristol Blogger shows me getting annoyed with the LibDems.

If you’re in the UK, you can look up your MEPs on the ORG EU Elections Site which looks pretty accurate to me.

Anywhere in Europe, you can try to find some MEPs on the Free Software Pact country listing.

For the 27th meeting in succession (feels like it anyway), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting because I’ll be at another event, raising the FOSS banner for TTLLP while speakers tell everyone to proprietarise everything (based on the preview essays). Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

In other news, the Koha foundation is still going through its birth pangs. I’ve suggested associating with SPI in the meantime, so the project could manage assets better, but it’s just not happening. I feel partly it’s due to misconceptions about SPI and its activities, but there also seems to be some blind faith in private companies. I heard a quote about the current UK Parliament crisis which seems relevant to the situation: “He is behaving as if he is just running this gentlemen’s club. What we need to do is ask people to be involved.”

“NCBA invites you to pick the Monday, April 6th edition of the New York Times to check out the front section for a very special advertorial on cooperative business.

NCBA will receive a copy of the Advertorial to place on its Web Site on Monday and we will distribute a link so you can post it on yours in the next edition of the eNews. However, we hope that you’ll let everyone at your cooperative know to pick up the Monday New York Times as everyone in the cooperative community should be proud to be part of this national effort to promote cooperative awareness.”

These are challenging times for all businesses, but cooperatives are well-placed to weather the storm. I’ll report back from our Bristol co-ops event later or tomorrow.

There have been some other changes at The Phone Co-op which I’m asking about this evening. More on those later.

• Telephone courses - it’s the world-wide web, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I want to make an international telephone call for the course.  If the course includes a teleconference, publish the area code(s) so I can include the cost of my calls when budgeting, please. Even better, offer a local (UK) number or Voice-Over-IP (VOIP, or internet phone) access for SIP phones, so it won’t cost me extra.
• Web classes - web browsers have plugins, but not all web browsers have all plugins and sometimes I’d prefer to watch your video stream on my TV instead.  That’s easy if it’s a video stream I can load in a standalone player (I can even remote-control some players with my bluetooth phone), but it’s a right pain if it requires Adobe Flash, locked down with javascript, DRM and so on.  Make video streams that can be used in Videolan or MPlayer, please.
• Web classes - if a class uses its own special downloadable program (even if it’s Java), then it’s not a web class.  Please make the class usable in a web browser and please publish a small test class so I can make sure my browser works before the class starts.
• Ordering systems - one site gave me no fewer than three big red error messages while I was trying to buy.  The first said the site requires Javascript.  I changed that setting, pressed back and re-ordered, then the second big red error said it requires cookies .  I changed that setting, then it said it needed Internet Explorer.  I closed the Firefox/Iceweasel window and gave up.  Please test your ordering system and show a full list of system requirements as soon as there’s an error, to avoid wasting my time.

Are there any good online course providers out there which do all of the above?

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing

This one is best avoided at design-time, by including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A in the design brief, but if you’ve ended up with JavaScript-based navigation on your site (check by doing “View Source” and searching for the code for your home page link and so on - if you can find it, then it’s probably not javascript) and it’s based on some template system, a webmaster can probably do a whole-site edit to put the navigation links in the page properly - or at least add a useful <noscript> tag.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture.

The structure of the website’s files and the structure of the link menus do not need to match, so if there’s a page that you feel is important, get your webmaster to add it to the navigation links across the whole site.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs.

This usually happens for one of two reasons: one is inappropriately-parked domains, which is mistake 6 below and often fairly easy to fix; the other is a misbehaving web application, which you’ll need to get a programmer to fix.

You can do a simple test of your web application by starting at your homepage and following links to a particular page; then open a new browser window and try to reach the same page by different links (or a site search) and compare the address bars (the bit of your browser showing http://) - do they match? If not, you’ve got this problem.

4. No keyword phrase focus in the content or conversely, keyword phrase stuffing

You can use a good word-counter on the text to see how common different keywords and keyphrases, or use the “webmaster tools” section of some search engines to see what they’re focusing on.

Keyword-stuffing can be fairly easy to see. If you “View Source” on a page and there’s a large block of keyword-intensive text somewhere in it that doesn’t appear it when viewed in a browser, then it’s probably stuffing. Many sites regard stuffing as a sort of spam, so you don’t want to be found doing this.

To fix these problems, rewrite the page text appropriately.

5. An optimized home page, but that’s it

Repeat your checks from problem 4 on a few pages other than the home page to discover whether you suffer from this. Also, see whether your website statistics show search engine visitors arriving at a variety of different pages (these are sometimes called “Entry Page” statistics).

6. Additional domains owned by the company are not properly redirected

If you usually use .co.uk, but you also have a .com domain, try visiting a random page on your website, then click in the address bar and replace the .co.uk with .com - what happens?

If the page is Not Found, then your domains aren’t properly redirected and you need a Redirect adding to the second one.

If the page displays but the address doesn’t change itself back, then your domains are probably pointing at the same webspace but aren’t properly redirected, which will mean you’re probably making mistake 3 above. Usually, the simplest way to fix this is with a conditional redirect. On Apache webservers, you can add a .htaccess file containing something like:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.

The above list of mistakes was published on Search Engine Land last week. The correction methods are all things used by my webmaster cooperative.