Ngä
wana, ngä rautara, nga tëtë, ngä pereperenga taru
~
Additions and alterations since your last visit
This website was first set up in May 2004, and was actively maintained over the next two years. As we added new files
or pages, or made other changes to this site, we recorded them on this
page, so visitors could see easily if anything had happened since their last
visit. Since the end of 2006, however, the site has been basically an archive, except for the Taitokerau Maori Dictionary, which continues to be maintained and added to. However, if and when any further significant changes are made to the "Sustainable Development" Database or new archive material added, this will be reported here.
There is a separate
"news" page for the dictionary.
If changes have been made to this or ant of the other pages, you may need to press the refresh
button on your browser while holding down the "shift" key to see the updated pages, if you store copies of recently
visited pages on your computer (most browsers do this automatically
unless you turn that option off).
We welcome
your comments -- you can contact us at
kupu at rakiora.org. This site is maintained at their own expense by unpaid volunteers, so please be patient
with any shortcomings (but let us know about them just the same), and
remember that only God is perfect! Mäna tätou katoa e manaaki, e tiaki.
2009
Since the death of Nena Benton in May 2007 family and other responsibilities have made it impossible Richard Benton to maintain this site as a forum for current research, and so it has become an archive site for the materials already on it, which will continue to be available to visitors. The Taitokerau Dictionary, however,is still actively maintained.
2006
March 26 - October 25
Oh for a life of leisure! We are sorry to report that there just has not been time to do much to the site as a whole over the last few months, although quite a lot of work has been done on the dictionary. At the same time, visits to the site have increased steadily. According to the logs we are now averaging over 5,000 visits a month, from about 1,000 unique addresses. Each visitor on average accesses four or five pages. The visits are almost equally divided between the dictionary and the rest of the site. New Zealand visitors are still a majority, but a much higher proportion (over 40 percent) now come from overeas-registered institutions and providers.
March 1 - 25
Apart from updating the address sections of many pages, there have been major updates to the Taitokerau Mäori Dictionary. The details are noted on the dictionary home page. Some new files have also been added to the Te Wahapü pages.
NEW WEB ADDRESS FROM MARCH 9th, 2006.
Our name registration came up for renewal on March 8th. It would have cost us $67.44 for one year to keep our ".maori.nz" URL. On the other hand, registration of the site with a U.S. registrar was going to cost us only NZ$30 for two years, including mail with spam control (which would be an extra charge from the New Zealand registrar). Very sadly (because, apart from any other consideration, we were one of the first to register a "maori" second-level domain address), we decided to re-register the site as "rakiora.org". In February and early March we changed most of the web addresses on the site from the original one to the new one.There are probably a few pages yet to be attended to; they will be modified as they are noticed! So from March 9th "rakiora.maori.nz" can no longer find us. If you haven't yet done so, please reset your browser to http://www.rakiora.org.
Meanwhile, because of the huge amount of junk mail received along with some very useful (and almost always very supportive) messages from users of the site, especially the Taitokerau Dictionary, we have changed the e-mail address and disabled the automatic feature. This is because the spammers have search engines which "trawl" web sites to pick up embedded e-mail addresses. To foil them, we have discontinued our old addresses completely, and written the new address out in plain text, with the word "at" replacing the "@" sign, and spaces between the two parts: kupu at rakiora.org. This isn't nearly as convenient, but it's better for us than having to plough through up to 100 junk messages a day and possibly missing the genuine ones. You can use this new address straight away (the old one won't work, anyway).
January 21 - February 5
Most pages have been updated with the new web address, and some other minor updates have been made. The most significant are on the biodiversity page (including a picture of the giant water snail Melanopsis trifasciata -- the back view to complement the front view on this page), with additional notes and files on the Albany to Puhoi motorway extension and some additional observations reported in the "Frog Watch" section.
Nga mihi o te Tau o te Kurï ki a koutou katoa.
IMPORTANT NOTE TO PEOPLE USING MOZILLA FIREFOX BROWSERS
We noticed some time ago that some versions or configurations of Mozilla did not seem to be able to recognize the internal hyperlinks within our html web pages.
They worked perfectly with Internet Explorer, and most Mozilla users also reported no problems, while others asked us why the links don't seem to work.
We are highly supportive of the Mozilla philosophy, and were therefore disappointed to find this problem, which for a very long time we weren't able to solve. Actually, the problem was a very simple one, but the solution took us almost two years to discover -- it was to do with the way that the links are coded. We are correcting this as we update the pages, but if you are a Mozilla user and find the internal links don't take you anywhere, please let us know. We may have just missed that particular page or some of the links on it. Relatively few of our visitors between late May 2004 and early February 2005 have used Mozilla -- of the 4658 unique visits recorded between 22 May 2004 and 5 February 2006, 3851 (82.67%) have been via Internet Explorer, 397 (8.52%) via Mozilla or Netscape, 155 (3.33%) through Safari, 16 (0.34%) through Opera, with another 239 (5.13%) of our visitors using unknown browsers. Now that we have these baseline statistics, we will be able to see whether Microsoft's dominance is maintained or weakened in the future.
January 1-20
First, there's the new address, mentioned above. To go with it, work has started on updating the on-line dictionary files, starting with the letter "A". There are a few new entries, but the most important change is the revision of many existing entries, so the accuracy and amount of information is now much greater. Other additions to these files are noted in the dictionary Notes and News page.
NGA MIHI O TE TAU HOU KI A KOUTOU KATOA
Here we are already at the eighth month of the Mäori Year and the first of 2006. We hope that you will all be able to sing with the cicadas, and carry the song through many seasons to come.
He kihikihi tara ki te waru
2005
The rest of 2005
After the last update mentioned below, the Webmaster had to concentrate on other things, and as a result very little was added to most sections of the site in the second half of the year. We will try to remedy this in 2006. However, quite a bit of work has been done on the Taitokerau Maori dictionary; some of this was incorporated in the on-line files towards the end of the year, and much more will become visible as 2006 progresses. Meanwhile, visitor numbers continue to rise. Altogether 3,494 unique visits (each address counted only once) were made in 2005, peaking at 388 in August, with the lowest monthly total at 182 in January. This is an average of about 290 unique visits a month. Overall about 60 percent of our visitors since May 2004 have been from .nz addresses, 3 percent from Australia, 9 percent from networks, 4 percent from dot coms, and 1 percent each from other U.S. registered addresses, Canada, and the U.K., with 11 percent from 49 other countries and 12 percent unknown. In April there were 168 searches of the Taitokerau dictionary; in the following months a total of 2,297 searches were recorded, the greatest number being made in August (428), followed by November (348) and December (339).
March 13 - April 15, 2005
New updates, including about 25 new encyclopaedic entries, were added to Te Papakupu o te Taitokerau on April 15. There were visitors from 218 unique addresses in March, and 203 searches of the Taitokerau dictionary. The total number of visits recorded since the site was opened on May 20, 2004 is approaching 3,000 (2942 to April 14). The number of visitors from outside New Zealand has been increasing steadily. In the early months over 90 percent of visitors were from New Zealand addresses; in Mid April this had fallen to 72 percent, with 18 percent from U.S. registered addresses, 1 percent each from Canada and Australia, 7 percent from unknown addresses, and the rest from 27 countries from Fiji to the Ivory Coast and Finland.
The picture on the left is one of two of the giant
aquatic snail, Melanopsis trifasciata, added to the links on our biodiversity page. "Giant" is a relative term -- at maturity it can reach
30 mm. in shell height, which is giant for a New Zealand freshwater snail. This endangered species is found in an area affected by
the proposed ALPURT motorway, and as far as we know this is at present the only website in the world on which you will find a picture
of it! Our thanks to Brian Smith and his colleagues at NIWA for providing us with these images.
February 24-March 13
The site has a slightly modified home page, including a few more links on the side panel, and on March 13 the new "Te Wahapü" page, complete with links to a few downloadable files, was activated. The material on it at the moment is mainly reminiscences and records of plans partly (but not yet completely) realized. More resources and materials related to the revitalization of the Maori language will follow in due course.
February was the busiest month so far for the Rakiora site, with 368 unique visitors. The Taitokerau Maori Dictionary was searched 385 times in January and February, for a total of 82 different words and phrases, 45 Maori words and 37 English. We are keeping note of the content of the searches of this database (reported to us weekly by ATOMZ) to guide the addition of new material to the database. Interestingly, although 88 percent of queries from search engines have come via Google, at present Rakiora is likely to come up on the first page more often in a general search of the web for material or topics found on our web pages through Altavista or Yahoo than it does in Google. Even the Taitokerau Maori Dictionary, which is unique to this site, is still rather difficult to locate via Google!
Feb 20-23
A new biodiversity page has been added - inaugurated by items on the Albany to Puhoi extension of the Auckland motorway, the appearance and disappearance of frogs, and links to information sources. There are also two new links in the Organic section on the sustainability page to very interesting sites devoted to sustainable community development, stemming from work based originally at Te Whaiti School in the Urewera Country.
NGA MIHI O TE TAU O TE TAME HEIHEI KI A KOUTOU KATOA!
February 1-19
A separate page containing additions and amendments to the Taitokerau Dictionary database has been added to the on-line files, accessible through the dictionary side-panel, so that users of this resource can have access to the information before the individual alphabetic on-line files have been updated. The new material is also indexed by the search facility. Matahauariki Institute Newsletter No. 9 has also been included in the Laws and Institutions section of the main page.
On February 18th, we had our 2,000th visitor (from one of 1208 unique addresses).
January 9-31
There were 182 unique visits to the site in January; of the total unique visits since the site went on line in May (1809), 79 percent have been from New Zealand addresses.
Further enhancements have been made to the Papakupu o te Taitokerau data and information files (see the Papakupu gateway page for details). Matahauariki Newsletter No. 8 is now available for downloading from the main "Rakiora" page.
January 8
Direct access is now available (from the side-panel on the Rakiora home page) to Te Papakupu o te Taitokerau. This is still very much work in progress, but progress is definitely being made! The latest developments are noted in the "news" section of the papakupu gateway page. There were 187 unique visits (different addresses) to the Rakiora web site in December. Up to January 7th, a total of 1423 visits from 862 different addresses had been made to the site since it went on-line in May last year..
2004
November 16 - December 18
Several new papers have been added, including Charles Crothers on Urban Disparities, Richard Benton on Law and Lexicography, and an extensive series of updates has been incorporated in Te Papakupu o te Taitokerau. Visitors in November came from 202 unique addresses.
October 28 - November 15
Final version of Val Lindsay's review and bibliography of material on indigenous sustainable development, in PDF and .html format, added to index page; latest Matahauariki Institute Newsletter also made available for downloading. Visitors in October came from 73 unique addresses.
October 27
Paper on "Lexicography, law and the transformation of New Zealand jurisprudence" added to Mätähauariki section of the index page. There were visitors from 133 unique addresses in September.
August 29 - September 25
Revamping of Sustainable Tourism page completed; additions made to index and sustainable development pages; "artwork" explanation page completed; complete set of pages and links for the International Consortium for Experiential Learning (ICEL) completed and made available through the index page. Number of visitors from different addresses in August was 170, up from 23 in May, 11 in June and 14 in July. August was the first month that the site has been indexed in Google. Most were from New Zealand.
August 28
Added background notes about the James Henare Maori Research Centre, including a biography of Sir James Henare, to index page (link in introductory paragraph). Also activated a few more links in the tourism page.
August
21
Added
some internal links to Sustainable Development page, plus two documents
- "International Trade: APEC and Maori Development" by Ella
Henry, and "Te Reo o te Taitokerau Iwi Education Partnership fact
sheet". Also updated "Network" page.
August
14
Updated Sustainable Development & Home pages. Activated links to John Tamihere and Tariana Turia statements re "Well-being & Disparity in Tamaki-Makaurau", and abridged versions of Volumes 3 and 5 of this study to SD page.
August 13
Added downloadable (PDF) files of Volumes 1, 2 (both sections) and 4 of the Wellbeing and Disparity in Tamaki-makaurau series and activated links to these from Sustainable Development page.
August 12
Corrections to some links (including activating e-mail links) on several
pages (including this one!). Added "return to contents list" option to Sustainable Development page.
August 11.
Original single-page public section of website replaced with three
main pages (Index, with links to or information about recently
produced resources and those currently in preparation; Sustainable
Development (with many new local and international links) and Sustainable
Maori Tourism, still very much under development, but also with many new links) and three new supplementary
pages (Notes about the Taitokerau Sustainable Development Research
Group, notes on access to te Papakupu o te Taitokerau, and
this page with notes on updates and changes).
>> Hoki whakarunga
>> Hoki atu
