New website for Stuff.co.nz

My favourite local news site Stuff.co.nz got a major overhaul yesterday.

Sticking with recent style trends, they now have more whitespace, larger and more colourful headings, flashy draggable content and they now permit limited user customisation.

Below is a side-by-side of the old and the new homepage – the most obvious change being the page height!

The underlying three-column layout remains, but is now much cleaner and easier to read in my opinion. Obviously, the new site is much longer, requiring a lot more scrolling, but overall I like the layout.

Gone are the dropdown menus from the old site (which were badly broken in the second beta of IE8), but I have mixed views on this. While I like the new horizontal menu at the top of the page, you now have to click twice and pass through an intermediate page to get to some of the subsections, eg, National News, then Education. For this, the dropdown was faster.

The inclusion of a (customisable) weather box at the top left is nice – afterall, that data comes from MetService (my employer for disclosure!). The other side of the header leads to my biggest gripe – the site search, powered by Google. Sadly, only around 50% of the results (during my tests) have dates attached – which is next to useless for searching for specific news items. Bring back the old search! Seriously.

So thus far I think the update is a good one, despite slower navigation and broken search. Final judgement however will have to be reserved until I’ve used it some more…

Baby Names 2008

The annual list of top baby names in New Zealand is out from the Dept of Internal Affairs. We of course added an Amy to the list, which didn’t actually make the top 30. Here’s the most popular in 2008,

Girls:

1. Sophie, 2. Olivia, 3. Ella, 4. Isabella, 5. Charlotte,
6. Lily, 7. Emma, 8. Emily, 9. Jessica, 10. Grace,
11. Hannah, 12. Chloe, 13. Ruby, 14. Lucy, 15. Ava,
16. Amelia, 17. Madison, 18. Maia, 19. Mia, 20. Holly,
21. Sophia, 22. Zoe, 23. Paige, 24. Georgia, 25. Kate,
26. Brooke, 27. Maddison, 28. Samantha, 29. Sienna, 30. Isla

Boys:

1. Jack, 2. James, 3. William, 4. Samuel, 5. Joshua,
6. Riley, 7. Liam, 8. Oliver, 9. Benjamin, 10. Daniel,
11. Thomas, 12. Jacob, 13. Ethan, 14. Jayden, 15. Noah,
16. Ryan, 17. Lucas, 18. Luke, 19. Max, 20. Hunter,
21. Matthew, 22. Lachlan, 23. Alexander, 24. Dylan, 25. Connor,
26. Blake, 27. Tyler, 28. Caleb, 29. Charlie, 30. George

[Source: NZ Herald]

The Great – Dangerous – Outdoors

The top four stories currently on the National News page at Stuff.co.nz make for sobering reading, especially since we are a nation that enjoys the great outdoors in summer…

Please take care out there! We’ve done too many Search and Rescue forecasts this summer already…   Be prepared and be safe.

Dads #1 teacher for sons

Yo fellow Dad’s out there!

Sons learn life skills from their dads

A new Father’s Day poll shows nearly 75 percent of Australian dads learned their most valuable and important life skills from their own fathers.

Top among those skills was how to drive a car, how to ride a bike, changing a tyre, changing a light bulb, building a fire and knotting a tie.

…

“We know from previous scientific research that boys who have active and involved fathers are more likely to do better academically, socially and emotionally,” he said in a statement.

…

via Stuff.co.nz (and archived via WebCite) …thanks Sarah!

And this coming Sunday (7th Sep) is of course Father’s Day here in New Zealand, so don’t forget to thank the old fella for your life skills!

Happy 50th Lego!

As acknowledged by Google with one of their custom logos, Lego turned 50 on Jan 28. I’m sure plenty of kiwi kids – big and small – are well familiar with the fun little bricks and now much more elaborate sets. I can’t wait until Matt is big enough to start building sets!

Gizmodo also posted about the 50th birthday, including a trivia timeline with some wacky facts…

• There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants
• More than 400 million people around the world have played with LEGO bricks (including me!)
• LEGO bricks are available in 53 different colors
• 2.16 million LEGO elements are molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute
• More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949
• Three eight-stud bricks can be combined in 1,060 ways
• The LEGO bricks sold in one year would circle the world 5 times

For more, click through to Gizmodo…

RIP Sir Ed

Beekeeper. Mountaineer. Philanthropist. Arguably the greatest New Zealander in our nations history. Sadly Sir Edmund Hillary died this morning at age 88. Rest in peace.