Te Awamutu Events Calendar
I've been working with the good folks at the
Te Awamutui-SITE Centre making plans for where the website is heading. The first new development is already in the testing phase - a new
community events calendar.
We've decided to use
Google Calendar to provide this service, for several reasons:
(1) It's easier than maintaining our own calendar application.
(2) It's very flexible and robust.
(3) It has some nice features such as allowing users to add Te Awamutu Events to their own Google Calendar.
The i-SITE Centre will now be taking over the running of the calendar. I'm again reminded of how lucky we are to have such a motivated and helpful team at the centre and I'm sure I speak for all our visitors when I say a big thanks to them for taking on this task.
You can see the new calendar at
www.teawamutu.co.nz/info/calendar.shtml
If all goes well, the new calendar will completely replace the old one within a month.
Labels: TeAwamutu
Te Awamutu Online
Te Awamutu is the name of my home town in the Waikato district of
New Zealand. Back in 1999, with the help of my brother Richard (AKA Scratch), I started the
Te Awamutu Online website.
The real-world reaction was mostly confusion. People couldn't grasp the concept of a website devoted to a town. Many of my friends pulled unusual faces when I tried to explain it.
Fortunately, even back then there were a number of ex-pat Te Awamutu people who wanted to make a connection to home over the internet. We had some encouraging emails from Kiwis all over the world and we persevered. It took a few years but eventually people who do still live in Te Awamutu started to "get it". It's since become very popular, getting over 1000 unique visits per day (there are only around 20,000 residents in the local district).
Sadly, as much as I love this website, it loses a fair bit of money and I can't find any way to make it profitable. Over the past few years I've scaled back my work on the site and tried to find new ways to keep it going with less work. Getting the
Courier online was a big breakthough (thanks Grant, Dean and the team). I'm also working with the
i-SITE Information Centre and other interested parties to see how we can work on it more efficiently. Whatever happens, I'm very committed to keeping this site active and growing.
Note: I'll use this blog to talk about updates to the Te Awamutu Online website. There are also RSS feeds available for local news stories and forums posts
here.
Labels: TeAwamutu
