Project HappyChild NEWS - Issue 13 1st September 1999

Welcome to Issue 13 of Project HappyChild News.

This has been an unforgettable month! Lots happening, as usual - the most nerve-wracking of which was uploading the wrong type of .htaccess file (for 404 errors) and effectively wiping the website from everyone's screens at 10am on 24^th August. My unremitting thanks to Gary at our ISP F9 for re-instating it only ten minutes later. Also to Stuart Whitmore at UniNova and to Paul Jackson at F9 for their help in identifying the correct format to use for .htaccess - the re-designed file was uploaded at 10pm that day, meaning that site visitors who use an outdated or incorrect link will automatically be directed back to the main Welcome page (see http://www.happychild.org.uk/index2.htm ).

The following day (25^th August) an article I'd sent off very recently was published in InternetDay which goes out weekdays to people all over the world. You'll see the resulting surge in website traffic over the following 24 hours on our new "Web Stats" page at http://www.happychild.org.uk/webstats.htm .

A flood of e-mails followed - amongst them one with no addressee, carrying a pretty firework graphic entitled "Happy 99". As I later discovered, it also carried the Happy99 virus which promptly created a virus-carrying e-mail to everyone we sent autoresponders to over the next couple of days. My thanks to Rick Olsen who enlightened me as to the source of the problem - we've now restored the computer and mail program and written to everyone concerned, but it may take a few days before the mail is up to date again, which is a relatively unusual situation here.

My thanks go also to Mike Ridyard for sorting out the cgi-visitor-count problems in early August - we've had some delay on re-activating our own cgi-bin but Mike's hoping to create a "send a postcard facility" for the site fairly soon. Incidentally Mike has offered to build websites for charities helping children at an astonishingly-low rate of Ł10 per page. Contact him via the Sponsors page for further details.

WEBSTATS
A welcome development this month has been our access since 14^th August to the log records for the website. Not all pages currently show a visitor count and actual accesses to the site are rather higher than what is logging on the count: the brief summary page we've created for webstats on site will be updated whenever time allows.

Access to the log has enabled us to identify a small level of non-accesses (hence the need for the .htaccess file), and we've also uploaded a CHMOD-ed robots.txt file as this is being requested regularly by the search engines indexing the site. Additionally a small favicon.ico file has been made for the main areas, for people bookmarking the site with IE5 browsers - running at around 25 per day before the icon was uploaded (this was our only guide as to bookmarked pages, no longer visible now that the icon file is available). We'd appreciate some feedback from anyone bookmarking any of the site index pages with IE5 to ensure the icon is registering.

PUBLICITY
We've also created a "publicity flyer" page on site this month, for anyone who knows of space on a noticeboard somewhere. If you have time to print this off and post it up somewhere this would be much appreciated - to reach children everywhere we need the maximum possible amount of publicity, in whatever medium this is available.

LINKS
Our thanks to Hubert Christiaen at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (Belgian Coordinator for European Schools Project) for the recent link to Project HappyChild, also to Jørgen Toftegaard at Sektornet, Denmark, for linking to our site. Through our contact with Karianne Helland we have also been able to post up some details of Project HappyChild at the Norwegian SchoolNet in Norway. Thanks go also to the National Association of Toy and Leisure Libraries (UK) for their recent link to Project HappyChild, and also to Ozlib and EDNA, both in Australia.

RESOURCES OFFERED
Our thanks to Amber Agha for the very generous offer of 20-25 office desks (London) free to a good cause - the resource went up on site on 10^th August and all desks were allocated by the weekend of 19th/20th August as scheduled.

Also to Miranda Stimson at Dorling Kindersley Publishers who have offered 50-100 books in Italian and Portuguese (wide range of titles) - if anyone has contacts with people helping children in Italy and / or Portugal, please ask them to contact us (see http://www.happychild.org.uk/fr/resource/surplus/index.htm ).

SYNDROMES
The new website for the Family Link Directory built by Harvey Twyman ("link families" helping with respite care for handicapped children and those with special needs) is now included in the Syndromes Links Index ( http://www.happychild.org.uk/syndromes/index.htm ) - our thanks to Harvey for the reciprocal link to Project HappyChild.

ACCELERATED LEARNING: AWARD
Our thanks to StudyWeb for the "Award for Academic Excellence" recently accorded to Michael Tipper's pages on Accelerated Learning in Area 3 of the website (a spontaneous award, and a most welcome surprise). Michael's September pages are now on line, at http://www.happychild.org.uk/acc/tpr/index.htm . As you'll know from previous Newsletters Michael organised the 1999 World Memory Championships which took place in London in the last week of August - you may have seen him memorising a pack of cards (in 3.5 minutes!) on "The Big Breakfast" or heard his recent Greater London Radio broadcast where a brief mention of the Project HappyChild website led to a visible surge on the visitor log graph immediately afterwards. The new Press Release with all the results from the World Memory Championships can be found at http://www.happychild.org.uk/acc/tpr/wmc/memchamp.htm .The women's champion was aged 12!

*****

We were expecting August to be a quiet month, with the schools on holiday - it has been anything but that! Pagebuilding is backlogged by about 10 days (due to increased site traffic and the virus) but should be clear again by about mid-September, as should the mail backlog.

My thanks go especially to those individuals who have helped us to resolve the technical problems encountered with the website this month (leading eventually to a vastly more effective and streamlined site overall) and also to the many people and organizations whose uploaded links to Project HappyChild are now making this website visible to a much greater audience worldwide.

Best wishes,

Penny.

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