For those of you in Waitakere City, you can pick up your copy of ‘Native to the West’ – a guide for planting and restoring the nature of Waitakere City. Free to Waitakere City residents and ratepayers. (Copies available at public libraries or from the council)

From the media release,

If you live in Waitakere City and want to know what native plants to grow on your property, this booklet is for you. It offers useful information, whether your patch is in suburban New Lynn, backs onto bush in the Waitakere foothills or is within walking distance from a West Coast beach.

You may want to ‘restore’ a piece of land to its original bush cover or simply create a corner for native plants in your urban garden to attract native birds, lizards and insects.

Whatever the size and scope of your planting project, ‘Native to the West’ is a clear guide to researching your back yard’s ecosystem and helps you decide what natives are best suited to your conditions.

For the period June 27-July 8, Damaris are making G8-related resources available for free on their web site. Check out: www.damaris.org/g8.

Tinkering around with the Movable Type stylesheets and templates in MT2.6x to try and get things just how I want them. But it has been a bit of an exercise in futility. They’ll look fine in Firefox but not in IE (or vice-versa). So I’m wondering about scrapping the whole MT 2.6 set up and moving on. Not that I haven’t been very happy with it but just that I’d like some more up to date functionality.

So I’m looking for a system that will allow:

• Multiple authors
• Blogging (obviously)
• File management – a sensible way to manage a set of uploaded documents and files. Might be a plug-in.
• Plug-in support of some type – for polling modules, special searches, interfaces to other systems etc.
• Good comment spam handling.
• Flexible theme/appearance management (even allow others to pick the scheme?)
• Web link database functionality.
• Nested categories.
• Integration of static pages. (I already do this in MT but it’s a pain to manage)
• Integration with Ecto.
• Image management.
• Behaves well in both Mac and Windows browsers – both for admin and viewing final result.
• Cost is a factor – but it doesn’t have to be free.

So far the contenders are:

• Movable Type 3 – Familiar interface, some good plug-ins, works with Ecto.
• Drupal – the full CMS – works with Ecto
• WordPress – easy set up, good blogging tools and configurability, current version won’t receive images from Ecto (previous versions did apparently, so I assume it’s a bug)

Don’t have too much time to spend on it so I’m only downloading a few, installing them on the iBook and having an initial play around. Any suggestions would be well received.

If all else fails I’ll just revert to the default MT 2.x templates and tinker on an interactive basis.

Also check out: http://www.opensourcecms.com/ for a great site allowing you to try these types of systems out.

The Make Poverty History campaign has a local web site now.

Check out: Make Poverty History (New Zealand-Aotearoa)

No local banner yet for NZ web sites (but nothing that a little Javascript hacking can’t fix).

The NZ Listener article I mentioned a few weeks back has come off online embargo. See: Turns out we didn’t save the whales afterall by Dave Hansford | New Zealand Listener.

Related whale stories at:
The New Zealand Herald : Group rejects Japanese plans for coastal whale hunt.
The New Zealand Herald : Whale burger on menu at Japanese fast food chain.
The New Zealand Herald : Carter urges IWC shake-up.

Interesting article in yesterday’s NZ Herald on plagiarism and Waikato University’s attempts to stamp in out. See: NZ Herald : Not in their own words by Philippa Stevenson.

One of the things about attempts by Amazon to build online digital libraries is that facility they provide for being to search books for key words or sentences. Sometimes if I’m suspicious about some text in an essay I’m marking I’ll find the book at Amazon and do a search in it (if that books been scanned). It’s surprising effective and quicker than skimming the paper book in the library. (For example try here)

One of the other things I’ve noticed is that school project instructions often include directions to use electronic or internet sources to find material out, but don’t include guidelines for children or parents on how to use that content. Is cutting-and-pasting from Encarta or a Google-search acceptable or not? Should they cite the source somewhere? And how critical should they be of information off the net? I’m trying to educate my kids but it seems we might be breeding a deeper culture of plagiarism that will be very hard to deal with later in tertiary education, church and the workplace.

Saw the slogan above (or very similar to this) on lots of posters pasted up around the Massey public library the other day. I immediately thought it was a promotion to get more adults to use the library, but on closer inspection, it’s a “Treaty of Waitangi” information campaign.

Then in the mail the other day (in the Listener, I think) we get a flyer about the Treaty of Waitangi web site, along with information about a new series of books that you can order for free about it – Called respectively “the Story of the Treaty,” “The Journey of the Treaty,” and “Timeline of the Treaty.” (Others coming later.) It’s part of the $6 million set aside by the State a while back to develop the Treaty of Waitangi Information Programme.

So I’ve surfed over there and ordered some books and had a browse around. I don’t imagine it will meet everybody’s demands as to what is relevant or needs to be included/deleted, but it’s worthwhile going to have a look at.

Paul said (grumped?) that he’d been looking for the D’Aquili and Newberg book but couldn’t find it on sale. So to make his day happier here’s a link to Metanexus’ collection of articles by Andrew Newberg.

Andrew Newburg mini-bio here.

Science and Theology news has a good selection of links this week covering stem cells, cloning, artificial consciousness and a great article about Sister William Julie Hurley.

See: Science & Theology News : The Daily Dose: June 17, 2005