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News, tips and information Archive

21/03/2006 Have been unable to update our Masterton Blog page as the blogger.com systems are severely crippled since 19/03. Hopefully all will be OK soon. If you are interested, you can read the Blogger status page here. This is the first major outage in the 6 years I have been blogging. This is not bad at all for a free product. In the meantime, congratulations to Dirk, Brian and Michael for winning the WPA Tripples. A rather slippery trio!! It is great to see the PNZ and WPA websites on the ball, with the immediate publication of the results (can I take some of the credit for this ;-). The PNZ website also has the Nat. Triples players list up. This is another thing I have been campaigning for. Good news all-around! -Tom.

20/03 Keep in mind that our NZ Petanque Wiki pages print well, and club newsletters could be published first on this Wiki and printed for posting to those without internet access. -Tom.

16/03 If you are logged in, you can invite other Petanque players who may not know about this Wiki. Simply go to the bottom of any page and click on "Share this Wiki". Whilst you are reading this, you can also click on it here: Share this Wiki. I hope you will help and spread the word about our new Petanque Wiki. -Tom.

15/03 Our list of North Island clubs is growing steadily. Disappointingly, no South Island club has as yet taken up the free offer of six pages on our Wiki. I hope they receive approval soon to forward my email to all clubs in the South Island (see item of 04/03). -Tom.

14/03 I am happy to announce that one of the most outstanding successes of Petanque in New Zealand, the 2002 Oceania Singles Gold! is now recorded at Achievements. As far as I know this Wiki site is the only place which mentions this achievement. -Tom.

11/03 Welcome aboard Cockle Bay! This is the second largest club on our Wiki (70 members) after Kapiti. The club statistics are interesting and show a large number of members are connected to the internet. From time to time we hear people say that internet access is low amongst NZ Petanque members - so far the stats show the opposite. We will get a better picture of membership in NZ when the PNZ Members Survey has been completed - which will be more detailed. The Cockle Bay club does not shy away from marketing and promotion. They boldly put themselves (photo and text) on petanque.org -Tom.

10/03 If you have a Petanque topic you would like to discuss with others, simply set it up on this Wiki of ours (see samples here). It is good to let us know your name of course - being upfront and honest is always a good thing. If you are not sure how to set up your proposal or topic for discussion, simply email it to me and I will do this for you. -Tom.

09/03 Adding photos to our wiki:

If you follow this link, you will be taken to an external page describing this simple process clearly. Make sure your image is around 450pixels wide (a max of 500px is only just OK), and has a max file size of around 30KB. I am looking for a simple programme that is able to crop an image, reduce the physical size and reduce the file size . If you have any experience with an application that can do this and it is free or does not cost much, let us know. Of course if you are one of those fortunate Mac owners, you would simply use iPhoto which is part of the Mac package. -Tom.

09/03 Have moved the "introduction" from the front page to the dedicated introduction page. This has given more space for your special announcements. Moving so much "introduction" text to another page, has made the front page a little faster (speed of download) as well - good news all-around! -Tom.

07/03 Trevor has made available some more photos of the Rotorua ANZAC Doubles at: RotoPhoto.

06/03 Remember, you are free to create your own wikipage and tell us about yourself. If your name is Tom Dickson, simply click on: "New Page" in the box that appears you type TomDickson one word no spaces but with the capitals. Type some text about yourself (I have done this here: TomVanBodegraven ). Whenever I write a comment on our Wiki I start with this link to my personal page - so you know who is writing. If you need help with this, get in touch with me.

04/03 Have asked CHCH Club to forward an email from me to all South Island clubs regarding offer of six pages on our Petanque Wiki website for each club. Received reply today: "....your request was referred to PNZ, and we are awaiting their response before actioning your request." It seems CHCH is taking a cautious approach. -Tom.

03/03 Don't forget to look at the New Petanque book page. I have just ordered two copies, one for me and one as an excellent gift. If this book takes off, it will without doubt help Petanque in NZ. I would like to acknowledge the author Gavin Campbell who wrote the very first and excellent Petanque book in the Southern Hemisphere (published 1995) "Petanque in New Zealand: More than just a ball game." This new book however takes over this number one position. -Tom.

03/03 Making it look pretty. I have adjusted some coding within our Wiki style sheet. This has given us the nice boarder around all images. Horizontal lines (which you simply create by typing 3 --- hyphens, or clicking on the Horizontal line icon (visible only in "editing" view) are now a kind of orange yellow instead of grey. You can now also highlight a line of text or put an important paragraph within an orange coloured background. Read about it here. -Tom

02/03 Have removed PNZ magazine Wiki pages (5). My initiative to set these aside (for Murray Porter the editor of the magazine - who was happy about the idea) is not welcome. This promotion of the magazine was done "without clearing this first with the magazine's owner". I apologise for this. All 5 pages and references to the magazine have now been removed. I did not need "clearance from the magazine owners" when I put up a 12 month subscription for the winner of a quiz!.

01/03 If you are after something and you are not sure where to look, consider using our search facility (at the top of any page). As a test type into the search box: Barbara Johnston and hit "return" or "enter" on your keyboard. Happy searching. -Tom.

28/02 Received two fantastic photos taken of the Waitangi Park piste in Wellington city by Rex Hayes. Many thanks Rex! -Tom.

28/02 Keep your eyes on the front page of our Wiki. Soon we will have a new page about an exciting new Petanque book on the NZ market. -Tom.

22/02 When you type the name McDonald into a Wiki page it will be represented as a link. This is because this is how Wiki makes links. To get around this if it is a name of a person, you simply put < raw > (without the spaces) on both sides of a name like this: McDonald, making the name look like any other name. Go ahead and click on "Edit this page" (you may have to log in first) to see what it looks like. You can read more about Wiki links at: WikiStyle -Tom.

21/02 I received a hand written letter today from our old friend Jacques Cochonnet asking if he can get a letter published from time to time on our Wiki. Some of you may remember Jacques from earlier days - a rather witty writer on things Petanque. He is Life President of the Société Internationale des Pratiquants de Petanquisme et Jeux Alliés (SIPPJA). We will make a special page for him here. -Tom.

21/02 Thanks to all those who have emailed me in recent days. I really appreciate your kind words of support. "this is the best thing that has happened in a while" is just one example. It would be nice if people could get used to putting text onto this site, rather than emailing me. This also happens on the MPC Blog page. Whenever I ask people for an opinion, I get emails. I am sure there will be no repercussions for just participating in a public forum. I have no problem in saying things - it's not scary at all. -Tom.

21/02 The simplicity of this Wiki is highlighted by the fact that I am able to set up a club with its 6 pages and all links in place in under 2 minutes! -Tom.

20/2 Welcome to the Kapiti Club. With over 150 members this is probably the largest club in New Zealand. I look forward to seeing their club statistics at the top of their page completed: members, male, female and number of members with access to the internet. -Tom.

20/02 The beauty of this Petanque Wiki is that groups and individuals can keep information current and up-to-date. If your main contact person has a new email address - anyone can make the update. Just imagine how difficult it would be for one central webmaster to keep a site with information about some 50 New Zealand clubs up-to-date. -Tom

19/02 Please make sure you pass on our password to all members within your club, and encourage them to help with work on the NZ Petanque Wiki. This way we hopefully avoid that the work is done by one or two people. With help I mean just a simple thing such as correcting a date, typo or misspelling of a name. Just because it was written by someone else, doesn't mean you can’t edit something. In other words, in the thru Wiki spirit, no one should assume ownership of content. -Tom

18/02 I hope all clubs will endeavour to give the basic statistics on their first page: How many members, how many male and female and how many have access to the internet. All clubs should have this basic information at their fingertips. -Tom

17/02 Remember, on this Wiki you can also make "comments" by simply clicking on "Comment" at the top of any Wiki page. This is great for commenting or explaining a change you've made, etc. -Tom.

16/02 Some handy shortcuts:

ALT+E = Edit

ALT+P = Preview

ALT+C = Cancel Edit

ALT+S = Save (ie. update)

(if you are one of those fortunate Mac users the "ALT" key is your "Control" key) -Tom.

15/02 In due course we will remove the introduction from the "Front Page". This will free up space for any of your announcements or alerts. This would also be the page ("Front Page") to use if you are looking for a playing partner for a regional or national event. -Tom.

14/02 The club membership information at the top of each club page will be useful in getting an overall picture of membership in NZ. Until the PNZ Members Survey has been completed of course - which will be more detailed. -Tom.

13/02 Have created our Trading Post (see link above) This is the place to buy and sell. Just make sure you remove your item once a transaction has been completed. Happy trading :-) Tom.

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