I have developed a new free web site (FreedomTrain: http://www.freetrain.org/ Which I think most on-line U.S. progressives will find modestly useful, in a limited and practical sort of way. The idea is to take emergency fax networks, and e-mail alerts to Nth degree. This site contains supporting petitions for progressive e-mail alerts gathered from all over the web. The advantage over other such sites it that you enter your name and address only once (when you register). You then go to the site which contains the petitions, and just mark a check box for each petition you support. The page with the check boxes contains one line teaser. You click the teaser to pop-up the petition and read it before checking it off or not. After you have checked all the petitions you wish to endorse, you press SUBMIT just once add your endorsement to all of them. The site, naturally, will look up your member of Congress or Senator for petitions addressed to them. I think this will be useful for progressive individuals on line, in letting you get electronic alerts at a single site, and send them off conveniently. I hope it will also be useful to progressive organization, who may find it helpful to send petitions to the site, asking that they be placed upon it. I will add, that in general this site contains it's own petitions in support of existing campaigns rather than simply forwarding existing wording. Most alerts specifically ask that you contact targets using your own words. It also avoids problems with copyright laws. In anything that calls for people to sign on (such as the Han Young petition) the original wording is (of course) respected. The site has both a frames and noframes version. The noframes version tries to be disablity friendly. It does use tables but in a way that I think will not harm the ability to read on text only browser. I tested this in Lynx -- but it may be different on versions other than the one I used or for people using lynx with text to speech converters. Please let me know about any problem my site poses for the disabled so I can correct it. For unavoidable reasons, the noframes version is slower -- so if you can use a frames enabled browser I urge you to do so. I will appreciate comments about this site -- either by private e-mail or online. Thanks Gar
