Project HappyChild NEWS - Issue 15 1st November 1999

Welcome to Issue 15 of Project HappyChild News.

Previous months have passed at breakneck speed - but this month has been unlike anything ever experienced before. Lots happening, all across the site - and traffic accelerating to the level of 5000 visits to the site in the third week of October, alone. Wednesday 27^th October marked the first day when we had over 1000 individual visits in the space of 24 hours. E-mail traffic has accelerated to match, although at time of writing this the Force 9 mail server is down and things have eased off enough to make writing this Newsletter a possibility ..... every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.

MILLENNIUM CHALLENGE DRAW
There have been a number of important developments - firstly the kind gift by Karen Letain at Corel Canada of several items of software for our new MILLENNIUM CHALLENGE Draw - CorelDraw 9 Academic Edition * PrintOffice 2000 * Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 Academic Edition *Corel GALLERY * Corel Print House Magic - "The Wizard of Oz" Edition. We would also like to thank Corel for their spontaneous gift of CorelDraw 9 and Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 to Project HappyChild, for use in our site development here.

SCHOOLS INTERCHANGE
Over the course of this month we have updated the Schools Interchange pages for Eurasia (Europe and Asia), a number of URLs having changed recently, and are currently in the process of checking links to other major areas of Schools Interchange as well as gradually progressing through the remainder of UK local government authorities to locate the relevant URLs for schools' websites listings in those areas. My thanks incidentally to Emmanuel Flaction for further details about EduNet [see Schools Switzerland], Will Austin in Exeter for updated information on Exeter schools [please see Schools England, Counties A-M [Devon] ] and to Colin Lavelle who supplied the page URL for Conwy schools' e-mail addresses [see Schools Wales ], and also details of the Europa Ideas Factory "packed with ideas and useful contacts for setting up links / activities / exchanges with schools in other parts of the world" which is now included in the Index to Free Worksheets and Educational Resources . Our thanks also go to Colin Lavelle for the links from Europa to Project HappyChild.

APPEALS & PROJECTS WORLDWIDE
This month we have finally been able to approach organizations in Relief Web and other networks, with a view to expanding the range of aid agencies featured in Appeals & Projects in Area 6 at Project HappyChild - several organizations have been added to a number of country pages, for example Helen Keller Worldwide - preventing blindness, restoring sight and rehabilitating the blind [eg please refer Appeals Burkina Faso ], GOAL, based in Ireland and set up by a sports journalist, all its patrons coming from the world of sports, and working to help the poorest of the poor [eg please see Appeals Philippines ], the Kurdistan Children's Fund, an international aid organization delivering humanitarian relief to the persecuted Kurdish population of Iraqi Kurdistan (northern Iraq) [see Appeals Iraq ], and RedR, Registered Engineers for Disaster Relief, an organization added to Crisis Appeals and which relieves suffering in disasters by selecting, training and providing competent and effective relief personnel to humanitarian aid agencies world-wide (RedR is also featured in our FOCUS area). We are currently liaising with a number of other aid agencies with a view to adding details to numerous country pages across the whole Appeals & Projects area of the site.

NEWS
EMPiK Sp. z o.o are currently seeking an English teacher for Poland, as detailed on the News page - please pass on details to anyone you know who might be interested.

PROJECT HAPPYCHILD SHOP
The final area of the website awaiting re-design (to accord with the rest of the site) was the Project HappyChild SHOP. With the advent of the software gifts from Corel (as above) this area of the site has now been completed, with all linked pages including charity booklists and catalogues, to which new additions have been made for The National Childbirth Trust, also Christmas Cards available from The Dyslexia Institute.

ADVERTISING
It has been decided to allow minimal fees (eg Ł10/week) for firms offering a range of goods to advertise their products in the shop, with site links where appropriate - commercial firms will be approached in due course to ensure a continuity of income to cover the likely-to-be-increasingly-minimal costs of maintaining this website. Those firms currently in the shop have sponsored Project HappyChild in some way (see our Sponsors page) and we are not yet deriving any ongoing revenue from this area [schools and charities helping children have free advertising facilities].

The main construction work is largely completed now with only the remaining Schools Interchange page-blanks to be completed, ongoing maintenance work likely to consist mainly of adding to existing resources on already-built pages and updating events pages whenever further details become available. All remaining construction work is scheduled for completion by the end of 1999.

EVENTS
We have an astonishing range of Sponsored Events to add shortly for Ockenden International, one of the charities in the Project HappyChild Directory. At present we're awaiting details of dates etc. but hope to have the full list of events on line within the next week or so. The General Events calendar is looking very bare with most 1999 events now completed, but we are hoping that more items will be included as schools become involved in the Millennium Challenge. Schools, charities and commercial firms can add details of any events raising funds for disadvantaged children, scheduled for 1999/2000, free of charge.

INTERNET SERVICE
Those of you who visit regularly will know our Internet Service Provider, Force 9, has experienced a range of problems with upgrading their equipment over the course of October (our webstats page gives some idea of the level of service-interruptions experienced here, although curiously this doesn't seem to have impacted the traffic-flow to any significant extent). My apologies to anyone who has had problems accessing the site over this period, but these circumstances have been entirely beyond our direct control here.

It would be appreciated if anyone who sent mail to Project HappyChild between 28^th and 31^st October could re-send messages as not all mail was "bounced" during the F9 mail server problems, we are told, and no e-mails came in to the main site addresses over that period [nor has any accumulated backlog materialised, although it may yet do so].

WEBSITE OVERHAUL
One very major decision taken over the course of this month was to remove from the website all pages which had been superseded or duplicated as the site evolved to its present integrated format (some 300 in all, as it transpired). The main reason for this was that although all the individual re-directs were working perfectly, it had become apparent that the search engines were re-indexing these page addresses, leading to a situation where expired page addresses were being perpetuated. Consequently a major "pruning" took place - with some trepidation at this end, in case this were to reduce traffic significantly - but dually our "overall re-direct" .htaccess page was also re-designed to a single screen (please see our referral page ) and, judging from the server logs, re-directed visitors have stayed to have a look around the rest of the website, with the result that traffic has actually increased, which has been a welcome surprise. Overhauling the website in this way was an unplanned and lengthy task, but well worth doing in the longer term as it ensures that all areas of the website can remain active from now on.

FAVICON.ICO
My personal thanks must go to Mike Ridyard who made a proper favicon.ico file for Project HappyChild and gave me the coding to embed it right across the site for automatic addition to any pages bookmarked using Internet Explorer 5 browsers. Judging by the webstats, the site is being bookmarked to an increasing degree with IE5, let alone any bookmarking by visitors using other browsers, which we have no way of measuring.

VISITOR COUNT
Mike has also sorted out the Visitor Count problems (you may have seen we crossed the 100,000-visitor threshold recently!) and is currently working on the possibility of adding postcard facilities to the site.

ROVING REPORTER
Kathryn Watts is now in the first year of an MA degree in Newcastle and has just forwarded her next article, which should be on line within a few days, via her Index page .

ACCELERATED LEARNING
More additions to Michael Tipper's FAQ pages are now on line, as are his articles for November. We experienced not-a-few problems transferring the articles across the Internet this month for upload here (attributable it seems to the altered-browser capacities inherent in the upgrade to IE5) and eventually resolved this through Mike sending all 16 new / amended pages for this month, via zipped files to the emergency mail address which has been quoted on the site the last few days. Mike's November articles are listed on the main Accelerated Learning Index page.

**************

As you will see from the above, this has been something of an action-packed month. Thanks as usual to everyone for their support, especially to those who have printed off our publicity page and stuck it on a noticeboard somewhere. It isn't entirely clear where all this extra traffic is coming from, so my thanks to everyone who has publicised the site in any way.

Best wishes,

Penny.

******************************************************************
Project HappyChild - linking children all across the world
http://www.happychild.org.uk + + + + Latest News + + + + About Us
******************************************************************

sign up here for our free Newsletter - Project HappyChild News - see also our "Latest News" page name of your country email  email

SCHOOLS WEBSITES Carib Amer Europe Asia Aust Pacific Africa UK

Bricks and Mortar (learning to read) free to print

PROJECTS helping children Carib Amer Europe Asia Aust Pacific Africa UK

index to free educational resources English spelling: 500+ worksheets 4000+ free maths worksheets   learn times tables how to do fractions accelerated learning   timelines puzzles games dolphins carols focus Aesop's Fables Twin Towers change a life

~ linking children all across the world ~               publicity for this site is always           much appreciated ~ thank you

linking the world's major languages ... French worksheets Russian-English Romanian-English Polish worksheets   German worksheets Dutch-English Italian-English Spanish (soon)   Arabic-English worksheets [ other languages in progress ] 'Any-language-to-English' worksheets

infinite facts   countries A-Z islands A-Z USA counties Sioux tribes

POKÉMON   Harry Potter   news newsletter

HappyChild DIRECTORY   Events 2008 syndromes links landmines

copyright

webmaster