The software used to run the Indymedia website has now been upgraded with the latest release (Oscailt 3.2) which now allows users to post stories and comments with multiple embedded videos and audios.

Previously you could only have embedded one video per story or comment. The embedded video was also recently upgraded a few months back to allow for embedded Politube.org video which are preferrable to YouTube videos because of licensing and the fact that they support independent media outlets and activists and are a non profit organisation.

The Oscailt software that is used to power the Indymedia Ireland web-site has now been upgraded to allow YouTube video to be embedded in both stories and comments. The embedded Youtube video above is an example of how it will look.

We're back, bigger, faster and stronger than ever!

After our hosting provider suddenly cut our database, on January 8th, we were plunged into crisis. We only ever raise enough money to pay our hosting bills and this was completely unexpected. We moved to a new server the following day, but soon realised that we needed a much more powerful system to keep up with the traffic volumes - the new server fell over immediately.

Happily, the indymedia community rallied round in no time at all. Thousands of euros came in through our online donation form, and more came through individual donations, cheques through the post and even from collections at protests. Altogether, within a week of launching our appeal, some €4000 came in - as large numbers of people put their hands in their pockets to keep indymedia online and to secure it's future.

Our techies got busy, and have built us an impressive new network of servers, whirring and buzzing away, scattered across the world, to ensure that the free media will keep on publishing. Due to this new infrastructure, and the huge show of solidarity that we received, we can now offer more features for contributors and readers. You can now publish audio files (up to 20MB) directly on to indymedia and publish PDF files too. In the near future we will be introducing extra features: a new encrypted server, giving users greater privacy in browsing and publishing.

Indymedia Ireland has come a long way since it first launched back in October/November 2001. We have been growing steadily in the number of stories, readers and contributors since then. We have covered many events and have been first with many stories that eventually broke through onto the national and even international scene. Every day, the website gets half a million hits. About 300,000 different people read the site each month. Lots of voices outside the corporate consensus are given a voice here and nowhere else.

As the site has grown, the Indymedia Ireland Internet Collective has grown too, suffering the usual growing pains of any organisation. In our case we have always tried to stick to our original objectives to be democratic, transparent and encourage participation and at the same time to try to adhere to the Global Indymedia Principles of Unity. Two years ago, we adopted a list of editorial guidelines to help us make objective editorial decisions. Now, we have agreed a number of structural changes, in order to make things run smoother and to make it easier for new people to get involved.

For this to work, and for us to keep on growing, we need your help.
It's that time of the year again when our bills are due, so we need donations to keep the website running. Our costs are very low; all we need is a couple of thousand euros a year to pay our hosting charges - all our members are volunteers and we put thousands of hours of unpaid labour into keeping things going. So, please, help us out by donating to our fundraising drive. Half of the money that we raise will be sent to Africa to assist in the set up of an Indymedia centre in Nairobi, Kenya, to coincide with the World Social Forum which will take place there in January 2007.
As well, make sure to check out the lists where people are working in the background on Indymedia - editing, making and planning independent media. Don't Hate the Media, Be the Media.

Indymedia Ireland Launches Oscailt 3.0 Platform As well as Indymedia Ireland's constant efforts to produce and distribute information in an open and democratic manner, we put a similar effort into creating and disseminating free software to allow others to do the same. Today, after more than 18 months of development, we finally launch version 3.0 of our Oscailt content management system.

New Features

Oscailt 3.0 has literally hundreds of new features which will progressively appear on the Irish site over the next few months. Some of the most important ones for users are the following:

1. Images Made Easy - Oscailt now automatically resizes all images for web-viewing - this means that you can now upload much bigger images than before.
2. Friendly URL's Indymedia URL's are now short and meaningful without any of the messy variables. http://www.indymedia.ie/features/dublin/anticapitalism is a new style URL - this means that search engines should give Indymedia articles an even higher ranking than now.
3. Lots of New Feeds: Podcasts, Comment Feeds, Atom Feeds, RSS 2.0 or RSS 1.0 ../feeds.more information
4. Lots of anti-spam / anti-troll measures Users can report any post on the site by clicking on the report post icon beside it. The ../editorial dalek has also been given some major new powers - it's hungrier than ever to exterminate those annoying trolls.
5. Context Sensitive headlines - every article is now accompanied by a list of headlines from the same author and with the same category - making it much easier to follow threads through our coverage of issues.
6. Lots of new ways to get involved - Oscailt 3 allows lots of different ways for people to get involved in indymedia Ireland - from reporting posts to managing a whole section of the site, there are more ways than ever to get involved in indymedia and help us to carry the voices of the excluded around the world!
7. New Multi-lingual Features Oscailt 3 allows us to manage the translation of the site into several languages easily - we will be starting to translate as much of the site as we can into Irish in the near future
8. A new look to the site - take a look around our newly designed site and let us know what you think!