stephen blyth’s blog

Now it’s time to head-offline to actually read something, rather than just scanning, sorting, saving links, removing unread articles from my desktop, more scanning, etc.  Yes, I’m downing tools and going on holiday.
Packed in my bag are a couple of books and unread newspapers.
And, yes, amongst everything else is my laptop. I’m taking it along [...]

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Ignore website visitors at your peril. That was the message Natasha Lampard gave participants at the Engage your community conference last week.
Nathasha, former head of user experience at TradeMe and web usability advocate, says if your website isn’t designed with your users in mind it’s simple: they’ll leave.
Ostentatious descriptions of usability are common, but [...]

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View Community gardens in Aotearoa New Zealand in a larger map
See the map above, well I’d like your help to add to it. As part of some research I’m doing for an article on community gardening I want to know what is happening around Aotearoa New Zealand.
By the looks of things there is a lot. [...]

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Telling stories using video is something that Nathalie Hofsteed and Lee Hales at Give a little are pretty excited about. They recently told me about plans to make it easy for organisations to share video updates via their donation pages. Give a little are on a mission to make it easy for fundraisers to account [...]

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I’d like to bestow my inaugural Award for excellence in community directories today. This is a personal award and doesn’t attract a cash or even in-kind prize. Just my gratitude.
As part of a website writing project I’ve been working on I’ve scoured the country for online community directories. The aim is to provide a way [...]

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We’ve stripped the beta out of the CommunityCentral URL and we’re up and running. What a buzz!
It was almost a year to the day since I started. At times progress seemed painfully slow. Wrestling with software development isn’t always easy, and not exactly fun. It consumed a lot of time. But we’ve got there. [...]

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With AJ’s help on the other end of the phone from Deutschland, I’ve updated the software that runs this blog. I’ve been wanting to use the latest version of Wordpress since it came out earlier in the year.
As an open source project, hundreds, if not thousands of people have been working behind the scenes to [...]

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On the CommunityCentral blog you’ll a find a sneak preview of the new homepage. After a demonstration at the NZ Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisation’s AGM we’ve decided to let people see what the new web-based platform will look like.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been doing a fairly intensive amount of usability testing. This [...]

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After a successful yMedia challenge in Auckland last year, Pamela and the team are expanding. The challenge matches web savvy students with community groups who develop a practical website or make use of online tools over a two week period. Both Wellington and Auckland community groups are invited to participate this year.
Participating organisations last year [...]

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In preparation for the workshop I’m running next week I’m looking for examples of what wikis are used for. What I really want to find is examples of New Zealand community groups with a wiki, private or public.
So far, I’m struggling to find anything run by a New Zealand community group. Within government there is [...]

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