Wainuiomata.com

Posts by Rob van der Linde

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Free BBQ and Play on Queen Street

Posted on December 13, 2022 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Events
Tags: wainuiomata, scavenger hunt, bbq

Join us for some FUN!
We have a free BBQ going, yummy treats for the tamariki, Outdoor Fun play and more!

Put your detective hat on Kids!
Can you help us find our friends Mata (The Kiwi), Nui (The Tui) and Rongo (The Lion) hiding around Queen Street.

Can you help us find our friends Mata (The Kiwi), Nui (The Tui) and Rongo (The Lion) hiding around Queen Street šŸ™‚
Let's bring the festive vibes to Queen Street and just enjoy each other's company!

We can't wait to see you all!

See more on Love Wainuiomata

Free BBQ and Play on Queen Street

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Initial forum load done

Posted on April 16, 2013 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: forum, website

We've finally done it!Ā  All the data from the old ynui.co.nz forum has been imported into the new website after weeks of hard work, that is all the threads, topics, comments, profiles, etc.

The new forum software has been uploaded to the wainuiomata.com site, but we will keep the old website running for a while until things have settled down.Ā  The new forum (and the rest of the site) is written in Django, while the old website was written in PHP and was very different in design.

We did manage to keep things as similar as possible to the old forum design, so that the data could be imported without too much rework.

Please note that you can't login just yet, there are still a few things to sort out before we can enable people to login with their old ynui.co.nz accounts (as well as create new accounts) but hopefully this won't be too long.Ā  The main thing is that the new forum is up, which is a huge milestone by itself.

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The forum is getting closer

Posted on April 13, 2013 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: forum, website

We are getting closer now to completing the move of the old ynui.co.nz forum and all the existing posts and comments on the forum to the wainuiomata.com website.Ā  There has been a great amount of work put into this project, rewriting the forum as it was on the old website, but in Django rather than PHP, so moving over a completely different system all together and converting the database to the new system.

I have put my best effort in making sure the old data (that is the posts, comments, and user profiles) are preserved when imported into the old system, by converting the data as it is imported and cleaning it where necessary.Ā  This has been a huge undertaking but well worth it, I have run a simulation of the import many times now, and am confident that when the time comes everything should be imported without any issues.

There are only a few issues to resolve now, and I expect the move to be done within 1-2 weeks from now.

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Blog update done

Posted on March 4, 2013 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments

I've finished updating the blog, which changes the URLs of all existing posts making them shorter.Ā  I have updated Disqus with a new URL map and setup redirects in place for the old posts which already had comments posted on Disqus before all the URLs were changed over.

I noticed that Disqus doesn't really update the old links when you look at the "also on wainuiomata online community" section below the comments and it doesn't really update the old post titles either, as I had also changed these earlier, but with the redirects in place everything still works fine including the old links to posts.

New comments added after this point should come up with the proper post titles and new URLs.

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Disqus support, but still more to do

Posted on February 27, 2013 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments

We've added support for Disqus comments for blog posts, bringing back commenting on blog posts.Ā  We had comments on our old ynui.co.nz blog a long time ago, but it became difficult to manage comment spam and we had to disable comments for a while.

I had always intended to bring back support for comments by writing a better spam filter, but it's just so much easier to use Disqus now.Ā  The great thing about Disqus is you can log in using either your Gmail or Facebook account which makes it easy for visitors to comment.

Important:

We are not quite done yet however, and this is a bit of a warning...Ā  I plan to make some changes to the blog which will change the URL of each post, I know this is normally a bad thing to do, especially for search engines, but it's really important and needs to be done in order to develop a new feature.

The way Disqus seems to work, is it links the comments to the URL of a page, so I am afraid that when the URL for each post changes, we will lose the comments from before.Ā  I am not sure how Disqus deals with this, but I have a suspicion we just end up losing the older comments when I change the URL for each post.

Because we have only just enabled Disqus and moved the blog over to wainuiomata.com, it's best to do this sooner than later, when there are almost no comments and the loss is not so bad.Ā  So I plan to get this done this week if possible.

We will keep you informed about any new developments to the site.

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Gearing up for Firefox 3

Posted on June 8, 2008 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Reviews

There's been a lot of hype towards Firefox 3 lately. The new version of our most popular browser has been in development for quite some time, and is due for release in June. For those of you that aren't aware of Firefox yet, it's an alternative web browser to Internet Explorer, that is released under a free Open Source licensing model (basically meaning anyone can help in developing it, fixing bugs, translation, or artwork, unlike proprietary software which is kept behind closed doors). Many people have already switched to Firefox for numerous reasons, such as tabbed browsing, integrated search, it's much faster, supports better web standards, a wealth of extensions, but most importantly protection from Spyware and other Internet threats and scams, or just the fact that it is Open Source.

Sadly, a lot of people only tend to hear about Firefox, after suffering from a really badly Spyware infested computer and taking it into a technician, getting it cleaned and being recommended Firefox as a preventative measure for the future, together with a decent Spyware removal program. These sort of trends are happening all over the world, we are not the only ones raving about Firefox. Firefox is continuing to show a rise in popularity and there are still no signs of slowing down. Firefox usage is now almost at 20% worldwide, however some countries such as Germany are much higher than that.

Firefox 3 is currently in Release Candidate stages, which means it's "almost" complete, but not quite. Firefox 3 is so stable though, a lot of people have found it more stable than Firefox 2 and are already happily running the Release Candidate now, despite it not even being finished. The latest version of the Ubuntu operating system, already has made a bold move to include Firefox 3 as it's default browser, despite it not even being finished yet, and it runs extremely well (I use Ubuntu as my primary operating system). Firefox 3 includes hundreds of new features and over 14,000 15,000 bug fixes and improvements. Rather than re-listing them here, I thought I would link to this screencast video.

Getting Firefox in the Guinness Book of Records

There's currently a campaign going on, led by the team at spreadfirefox.com, to try and get a record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours, on the day Firefox 3 is going to be released. The campaign is called "Firefox download day 2008" and you can already pledge to download it now, more information can be found on the Firefox download day website. Let's see if we can increase the number of downloads for New Zealand.

Update: Mozilla have just announced today, that the final release date for Firefox 3 will be June 17, at the time of writing that is only 5 days to go!

Update: Firefox 3 has now been released, go to the Mozilla Website and download it now. Apparently it was downloaded so many times the download server crashed at some point, but is back online now, that comes to show the immense popularity of Firefox. I had a look at the download counter, and it's already up to 2.9 million downloads in less than a day! At current, it's being downloaded at about 4600 times per minute, that's insane! I just checked it again an hour later, and it's now over 4 million downloads going steady at over 10,000 downloads a minute, that's absolutely amazing, Firefox has to be the most popular open source project ever.

Edit: spreadfirefox.com doesn't exist anymore, but getfirefox.com is it's replacement.

dday_badge_fox.png

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IBM releases itā€™s Lotus Symphony office suite for free

Posted on September 20, 2007 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Reviews

EDIT: Lotus Symphony no longer exists, please check out Libre Office instead.

As the title says, IBM has just released it's new office suite, Lotus Symphony free of charge. When I first read about this announcement myself, it brought back memories of IBM's classic "Lotus Smart Suite 9.5" office package, which was often installed when you brought your Windows 98 based PC. Sadly Lotus Smart Suite slowly faded away as Microsoft Office started to gain popularity, and is now virtually unheard of anymore.

IBM Lotus Symphony on the other hand, is something completely different, it's actually based on the popular free Open Office office suite. So basically "under the hood" it's still Open Office, with a fresh new look and additional features added by IBM. The good thing also, is that IBM is donating a lot of it's changes back into Open Office, so IBM is also helping Open Office along in the process. Lotus Symphony is available both for Windows as well as Linux.

Being based on Open Office, it also uses the popular Open Document file format (ODT), a free and open document standard that is now shared between many other office suites. You can still import your Microsoft Word DOC files off course, and export to DOC format too. One of the big advantages of using open standard document formats such as Open Document, is because the specification to the format is open, your documents are guaranteed to still be readable by software 20-30 years from now, which closed source formats/software cannot always guarantee.

Have a look at the screenshots if you like, on the Lotus Symphony website, or download it if you want to try it out. If you already have Microsoft Office installed, don't worry, you can run both programs on one PC no problem.

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