Site news and information

AS from Sunday 6 August 2006, Morning Star Online users no longer have to wait until midnight to get their daily fix of socialist news.

From this date we will be uploading stories to the website as soon as we get them, thus providing a continuous running cycle of news to all our readers.

This will bring the Morning Star site in line with general news-based website practice and allow Morning Star Online a more dynamic way of operating.

Users must now keep in mind that, when comparing the printed edition to the online one, the dates of stories will differ by exactly one day. For example an article appearing in Monday's printed edition will be shown online, but with Sunday's date.

A bug causing older versions of the Internet Explorer browser to pull stories to the bottom of the page has now been fixed.

However, if you are using any version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer I would recommend users to take a look at either the Mozilla or Opera web browser. Both are much better faster at rendering pages and are less likely to crash your computer.

Both are free, open source and can be dowloaded at:

MOZILLA
www.mozilla.org

OPERA
www.opera.com

USERS can now help keep the Morning Star independent by donating to the Fighting Fund online.

Simply visit http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/fightingfund.html and click through to the Paypal service to help raise the £16,000 needed every month needed to keep the paper alive and campaigning.

AFTER a brief few months sat across the pond in the US, Morningstaronline has now returned to these shores after moving to Docklands, east London earlier this week.

The US servers previously hosting the site, fell short on numerous occasions in providing us with a decent service that would be fast, efficient and reliable.

Late last year when we made the switch to the US hosts, I was hopeful that no further big moves would be necessary for at least a couple of years

However, a few users got in touch with me to complain that the site was running slow and further problems arose whenever I needed to get in touch with their technical helpdesk. I was either held waiting on the phone for long periods or given false information that did little to help me.

The final straw came when the US hosts decided to pull our website down for 48 hours without informing me.

There has already been a noticeable difference to the speed of the website and, so far, I am very encouraged by the capabilities that the new hosts provide in handling an ever-expanding news website like our own.

This should be the final move for the website and it'll now mean that I am finally able to concentrate on providing extras features for all users to enjoy.

Many thanks for bearing with me while all these changes have been taking place.

Subscribers will also have noticed that I have added an Election 2005 section, which should help users make up their mind where to put their cross on May 5.

CARL WORSWICK
Morning Star Webmaster

The search results now show the latest stories first which makes more sense than the other way around. This was proving to be a bit of an annoyance, and unfortunately not as easy to fix as it first seemed. However, it's now done :-)

New addition to website: Links section. Just click on the link on the left side of this page.

Andrew Wigglesworth
Technical support

REGULAR users of Morning Star Online will notice that we've made a few changes to your paper's site over the last week or so.

Many of these will be invisible as they involve technical changes designed to make www.morningstaronline.co.uk more powerful, flexible and secure.

At the end of November, we moved the entire website to a new server with lots of space for future expansion.

Some of the issues that users have raised in the past will now be solved - in particular, the annoying problem that saw users being logged out randomly when they were actually signed in.

The system that we use to put information onto the site has been redesigned, allowing us to spend more time on development.

We have also made an important change to the £1 payment option for the site.

In the past, £1 allowed access to only today's edition of the Morning Star.

Now, £1 will pay for access to today's edition, as well as a growing archive of past online stories, for a 24-hour period.

More additions and upgrades designed to improve the useablity of MS Online will be put in place over coming weeks.

Information on these will be available on this page as they happen.

Carl Worswick
Webmaster

Contact me here