[ Thanks to Dan for this
link. ]
“The planning for unionrecord.com began six days before the
strike, with a meeting of the local guild president; Chuck Taylor;
Mike Blain, a freelance technology consultant who works on union
sites in Seattle; and several photographers. The union insisted
that there be a print edition, but the primary focus was the
Web.”
“‘We wanted a lean, functional site that was quick to index,
archive, and search,’ said Blain, also a co-founder of WashTech, a
local union for programmers. The site needed to be easy to use for
volunteer strikers who weren’t HTML-proficient. So Blain grabbed
the domain name, got an IP address, and started building a
custom-made database driven publishing system.
“Blain ended up creating a simple form where strikers could
input information into categories such as headline, byline, and
text. ‘Yeah, I built it from scratch,’ said Blain. ‘I used PHP (PHP
Hypertext Preprocessor), a server side scripting language, and
mySQL (a version of miniSQL), an open-source database program on
Linux. We didn’t have to buy any software at all to build the
site.'”