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The CommunityNet Aotearoa monthly newsletter.
"News and views on community networking throughout Aotearoa."
Keep moving, keep fit is the theme of Parkinson's Awareness week which runs from 1 to 7 November.
Giving incorporated societies the ability to file their financial statements online as well as update their address and contact details is part of an overall strategy to make compliance more accessible to societies.
The Meningitis Trust has awarded its first financial support grant to improve the quality of life for someone whose life has been turned upside down by meningococcal disease.
Gambling Act regulations gazetted 21/10/2004 mean that community groups will get more funding and better access to information about grants from gaming machine profits.
The Financial Reporting Structure (4 August 2004) contains some sections of particular interest to not-for-profit organisations.
Latest community news, events, jobs and ads.
Community sites linked this month:
Develops and drives information and communication technology (ICT) projects that deliver beneficial social outcomes
Features on the Housebound Service, and new Large Print and Advice books
The Social Report provides information on the social health and well-being of New Zealand society. Indicators are used to measure levels of well-being, to monitor trends over time, and to make comparisons with other countries
Sustainable development involves caring for the environment, whilst thinking about the economy and society's needs, now and on into the future. This practical education programme promotes sustainable households
Statistics New Zealand is developing measures for sustainable development and publishes reports on progress
The Trust's vision is to raise the potential of computers and the Internet for Rotorua communities
Helpful if you're using population statistics, with some tips and common errors to avoid, ways to use and analyse demographic data etc. Also useful research and planning, tools and resources and events sections
Contributes to maintaining and improving the environment in New Zealand through advice to Parliament, local councils, business, tangata whenua, communities and other public agencies
The New Zealand Open Source Society is a nonprofit organisation set up to protect, advocate and advance Open Source Software in New Zealand
The New Zealand Leadership Institute enhances the understanding of leadership and ensures New Zealand has talented and skilled leaders who will develop, guide and advance our organisations and communities
The Games from 15-22 July 2006 will feature 12,000 participants, competition in 30 sports, world-class athletes and artists, band and choral performances from more than 70 countries.
More links.
Let's just imagine for a moment that you're emailing out a message for your organisation. You've managed to compile a list of 150 relevant email addresses and you're going to send your carefully crafted message to all of them. In your email address book you create a list called "everybody" which makes it easy to add all the addresses to a message in one go.
So far, so good. But what do you do next? Do you put the addresses in the To: field? Do you put one address in the To: field and all the others in the Cc: field? If you do either, then you're one step closer to being unpopular with a lot of people. You've also just immediately reduced the impact of your message and potentially lost your readers.
If you add many addresses to the To: or Cc: (Courtesy copy or Carbon copy) fields then a couple of things happen.
Another possible consequence is that your message will fail to pass through the email system. Many ISPs limit the number of addresses you can add to one email as a precaution against spamming. Your message may simply not be sent, or it may fail in the middle of sending. Many spam filters will use the presence of multiple addresses as one of many indicators of possible spam.
There are a couple of things you can do to make your emails a bit more credible, effective and "professional".
If you don't see a Bcc: field in the Address area of a new message then look at the menus, check the Help screen or ask whoever provided or supports your email software. For example, in Outlook Express for Windows go to the View menu and choose to show All Headers. In Mail for Mac OS X go to the View menu and ensure Bcc Header is checked.
Continuing our Tips for Terrific Sites, this month's Tip tells you how to make sure your pictures don't drive away your visitors.
Way back in 1997 my first digital camera was one third of one Megapixel, and each photo used about 275 Kilobytes of hard drive space (275Kb). These days a perfectly good, brand new mid-range 3 Megapixel camera can cost as little as $250 and take photos which use a good megabyte of storage space. For more money you can buy a camera with even more Megapixels whose photos may occupy 5 or 6 megabytes or more at best quality.
Put one of these photos (even that relatively small 250Kb photo) straight onto a web page or attach it to an email and you'll be in trouble. Why? Because it'll take ages to send and ages to receive. Your web page will load as quickly as glaciers melt and your visitors will run, not walk, away from your site.
If you have a high-speed broadband connection you might not notice how slowly it transmits, but users with a traditional dial-up modem definitely will. One of the most common complaints people make is about the size of email attachments or slow-loading web pages.
There are a couple of very simple steps you can take to create great-looking photos which load quickly on web pages or speed their way through the email system. You don't have to be a computer whiz either. The steps are identical for both email and web pages. There are some links to free software at the end of the tip.
Make a copy of your photo. The following steps will make drastic changes to it, so work on the copy and keep the original in a safe place.
Crop your photo: remove any unwanted edges. For example, if you have a photo of yourself in a park, but your web page requires a head shot, crop away the park. This will bring the focus in on you and make the file size smaller too.
Reduce the actual size of the photo. 450 pixels on the longest edge is still quite a big photo on most screens. There's no one size fits all so you'll need to find out which size works best for your purpose. This step will dramatically reduce the file size and allow the picture to load more quickly.
Sharpen the picture a little. This make the edges between objects more distinct and gives the photo a bit of extra "punch".
Save the picture as a jpg (for photos) or a gif (for logos and the like). The jpg format makes the file size smaller by throwing away some of the pixels in the photo. If we use a little bit of jpg compression we won't notice that some pixels are gone. If we use too much then the photo will look awful. Depending on the software you use, you'll have to experiment here, but often a middle amount of jpg compression works just fine.
By following the steps above you can reduce loading time from perhaps sixty seconds per picture to six seconds. You'll keep friends, make a better impression, save storage space and bandwidth costs.
Mac OS X: the free and included iPhoto will do a great job.
Windows: XNView and IRFanview are highly recommended and free.
Earlier Sites and Tips are available online.
In November 2004 there were:
Currently, the most popular pages are:
The most popular file download was:
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