Project HappyChild NEWS - Issue 5 31st December 1998

Welcome to Issue 5 of Project HappyChild News.

We'd like to welcome our new subscribers for this issue. As you'll see from the above, this e-zine is now available in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as English - to access any of the auto-translation facilities, please use the links above.

We would like to thank SYSTRAN for enabling us to make the whole website available in the above languages. Initially we have linked to their translation facility from our Welcome page [ http://www.happychild.org.uk ] and Michael Tipper's index page, as well as Kathryn Watts' index page: we will gradually be making these facilities available from individual pages across the whole site.

Kathryn Watts has recently joined Project HappyChild as a Roving Reporter. She's a student studying Psychology at Manchester University in England, and has already travelled fairly extensively across the world. She has masses of photos from her travels and will be writing articles about different aspects of children's lives in the various countries she has travelled through and worked in; her first article about the lifestyle of children in the Far East, Africa and Vietnam is now on line and she's currently in Marraakech (Morocco) from which she'll be reporting back shortly. You'll find Kathryn's pages at http://www.happychild.org.uk/nvs/news/kathryn/index.htm .

More Accelerated Learning articles (free-to-print) have recently been added to Michael Tipper's area of our site and the next set will be on line in a few days. Michael is organising the 1999 World Memory Championships in England and you can e-mail him for further details. The Accelerated Learning pages are athttp://www.happychild.org.uk/acc/tpr/index.htm .

We are gradually adding to our worldwide Appeals area featuring appeals and projects helping disadvantaged children across the world; most of those on line at present feature in the Eurasia area of our site (http://www.happychild.org.uk/nvs/appeals/eurasia/index.htm ) and we have recently reset the Appeal for help in Landmines Awareness Training in Bosnia so this can be printed onto a single page. We are currently liaising with a number of the UK-based charities in the Project HappyChild Directory (http://www.happychild.org.uk/dir/index.htm ) to identify appropriate URLs to which to link direct on their sites which cover their work in a significant number of countries across the world, and will be approaching leading charitable organizations in other countries as time progresses. Organizations notifying us of direct-URL-links are requested to contact us, to enable us to group notifications effectively for pagebuilding.

As with all other e-mail addresses on the site there is an Autoresponder in place which (in the case of Appeals) details precise information required for listing. You will know from Issue 4 of this e-zine that we experienced not-a-few problems after changing our Autoresponder sending format to plain text (to accommodate a number of requests) - we are pleased to advise all the Autoresponders and general e-mail sending format have now been changed back to html; we have discovered in the process that Outlook Express allows us to nominate plain-text-sending for nominated individuals, so please advise if you would prefer your copy of this e-zine to be forwarded in that format.

Schools Interchange [http://www.happychild.org.uk/schools/index.htm ] is another area of the site where we have just begun to add translation facilities. We'd like to welcome the first schools from America, Canada and Australia who have recently listed their homepages on the Interchange; we are currently looking at possibilities of integrating with a number of school-net-links worldwide to maximise the speed at which interlinking can take place, and are investigating similar possibilities for Worksheets and free educational resources.

Links to the excellent free Maths resources for all key stages provided by Cambridge University in England are now in place [http://www.happychild.org.uk/wks/math/index.htm ], and over the last few weeks we have added significantly more pages to the free-to-print English reading System, Bricks and Mortar, in Area 5 of our site [a total of 85 pages now on line at http://www.happychild.org.uk/bkm/index.htm].

Because of the increasing size and range of the website we have now redesigned our central home page to allow links to recently-added pages from both sides of the first screen of the welcome page at http://www.happychild.org.uk . This will be updated periodically to allow easy identification of new pages for regular visitors; the shadow welcome page (http://www.happychild.org.uk/shadow/index.htm ) for anyone whose browser does not bring up the full range of colours, has been updated similarly and re-linked to the shadow directory index, directory pages and shadow site map. Please advise us if your browser has trouble accessing any full-colour pages in other areas of the site, and we will look at the possibility of constructing more shadow pages - this seems to be a problem Internet-wide and many sites are now building "text only" areas to compensate.

Our PageMaster [http://www.happychild.org.uk/pagemaster.htm ] has now been fully updated to cover all 400 pages on line to 12.12.98, to enable new visitors to find their way easily to all the various areas of the website. However because of the complexity of the html involved we haven't yet discovered a way easily to modify this for a "shadow" version so it may for the time being remain inaccessible for some visitors. Additionally we have discovered that the free auto-translation facilities only translate a small percentage of this webpage (which actually prints onto about 15 sheets of A4): it isn't practicable to modify the length [by subdividing into more pages] as the primary purpose of the PageMaster is as a search engine tool and we would otherwise have to re-register all the component pages individually.

We are holding a small number of advised changes to Directory Index and Directory Pages [not yet implemented] as we are awaiting notification of advised-changes-required from a number of organizations in the Directory; obviously the Christmas break has intervened and we hope to receive the remainder of the updated details shortly, to enable the pages to be changed en masse over the next two to three weeks.

We'd like to thank Chantale at Corel in Canada (and Derek at Channel MarketMakers, UK) for the free copy of Corel's WebMaster Suite which arrived here shortly before Christmas. There's a range of stunning graphics which vastly increases what we can achieve visually with the site; there are also possibilities for framed pages etc. but because not all browsers support frames we'll probably leave this option for now, to preserve accessibility. Also we learned recently that search engines such as Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler, Infoseek and HotBot don't support frames - and as search engine visibility is an important part of the publicity factor for Project HappyChild, it's probably wisest we leave page set-ups as they are, for the time being at least.

So far we've been unable to try out the automated pagebuilding facility which WebMaster Suite offers - simply because we don't at present have any of the commercially-available database programs with which it's compatible. If anyone can help we would appreciate this! Also we would value help with database design (for schools, and for free educational resources, initially, to integrate with the current set-up on site) if anyone reading this has any experience of setting up custom databases.

Sponsored Events (organised by charities helping children) currently on line on the site include WhiteWater Rafting (UK and Nepal), Parachute Jumping, the Flora London Marathon, the UK Cycle Ride (London to Canterbury) and the annual Cycle Challenge - Vietnam in 1999, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City - you'll find details of these at http://www.happychild.org.uk/fr/events/index.htm . However the General Events calendar is looking decidedly bare with December's events now all completed, and we would appreciate some updates for January onwards! Charities can use this area to detail (free of charge) any events planned for 1999, and schools and universities can use it to post up notifications of any fundraising events they organise for any charities in the directory or any of the worldwide appeals and projects featured on the site.

The Resources Required area (for schools and charities to post up details of items required) now includes used postage stamps, spare foreign currency, computers and office furniture. To advise us of surplus items available or required, please see the Resources index page (http://www.happychild.org.uk/fr/resource/index.htm ) [there is no charge for notifications by schools and charities helping children, anywhere on the site].

Now that the basic infrastructure of the site is in place we should appreciate receiving some contributions from children for the stories / poems / jokes section of the website, as well as any items for news, views, articles, Infinite Facts Series, etc. Ongoing pagebuilding commitments mean that there's usually a 2-4 week delay before items can be added to the website, but items such as worldwide Appeals and Projects take priority (usually less than 7 days) and we aim to get notifications of events, resources etc. on line within 7-14 days.

I would like to thank the many people who've been in touch, and helped in various ways, over the last five weeks - there simply isn't space to mention everyone but all the help, input and contributions have been very much appreciated. Thank you also for the many Christmas greetings received!

Wishing you all a happy and peaceful 1999,

Best wishes,

Penny.

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