From oil dependence to local resilience

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Permalink Reply by Les Squires on April 19, 2008 at 15:24

....hesitate to promote ning as the solution for all our needs, as it maybe that we find something more integrated

Hi James,

Deirdre and I would not only hesitate; we'd say from the start that Ning is not the solution of all of anybody's needs. She and I are evaluating a tool to see if Ning might play a role alongside many other tools for meeting global issues. I hope that is OK with you... Please let us know.

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Permalink Reply by Deirdre Kent on April 19, 2008 at 17:23

Hi James and Les

I will persist with this meanwhile for Otaki and what I need to know is how to change the title to Otaki and when. I have tried to use a wiki before but never quite got into the habit, was too tied to email as a means of communication. Also the wiki I was using had a very very cluttered front page and it put me off big time. But for me this looks a little easier, especially when I have now learnt some fairly basic things like putting my favoured bookmarks in a bookmark bar. Compared to you two guys I am a relative novice at all this. But I found it easy a minute ago to change the colours and hopefully other things might be easy, dunno yet.

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Permalink Reply by Les Squires on April 19, 2008 at 18:07

Click on this link -- http://nztransitiontowns.ning.com/main/admin/appProfile -- change the title of the site to "Otaki Transition Towns" or whatever else you might want. If this link takes you simply to the homepage, let me know and I'll guide you thru the steps via skype.

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Permalink Reply by Deirdre Kent on April 20, 2008 at 5:28

Done! So easy!

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Permalink Reply by Christoph Hensch on April 20, 2008 at 10:51

I think we are still far from finding the perfect tool. And even if we did find the perfect tool - people are very peculiar in how they work what they prefer. In my experience a wiki is perfect for an asset inventory - a body of information that is ever growing and being put together by the community. For discussions I prefer forums and for news on a project a blog is probably best.

I still have to figure out how social networking sites like ning and facebook for example are helpful in supporting a community development programme or transition town initiative. I suppose it is useful if people from allover the country or the globe connect - but I can never replace direct personal human contact. Besides, social networking is always exclusive of those who are not computer savy or simply are not broadband connected...

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Permalink Reply by Deirdre Kent on April 20, 2008 at 15:20

So what I request is that ASAP we can get a link each way from nztransitiontowns.ning.com to transitiontowns.org.nz. I think the journalist who interviewed me will have her story about Transition Towns in the local paper tomorrow or next Thursday and I have given her one website only, the org.nz one which has been up for a while. We may have missed but it is worth a try. I don't have her phone number to check with her. Or is there a way I can do it myself on nztransitiontowns.ning.com?

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Permalink Reply by Les Squires on April 20, 2008 at 18:58

I've added a link from the homepage to Transition Towns.

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Permalink Reply by Les Squires on April 20, 2008 at 19:02

James, can you activate the RSS feed on your site. Makes it tons easier to watch the changes that Deirdre will want to know about. Thx!

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Permalink Reply by Christoph Hensch on April 21, 2008 at 13:01

Another suggestion: as the site gets busier, could we add more than 8 items to the latest activity column? Maybe 20 or so?

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Permalink Reply by Les Squires on April 21, 2008 at 13:18

done. reset to 20.

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Permalink Reply by Craig on April 27, 2008 at 18:34

I'm starting to come around one this a bit. :)

I think this Ning site is potentially going to be extremely useful. Also, Ning has an programmer's interface, which means that geeks like myself can extend it or access the data that we put into Ning. For example, this could mean that even if we use something else for our main public website at transitiontowns.org.nz it could automatically include the latest images or blog posts or whatever that have been added to the Ning site.

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Permalink Reply by Rimu on May 6, 2008 at 9:24

I have some small experience with running a drupal site, and I find it extremely flexible and powerful. It's a wiki, events calendar, forum, gallery, email list and everything in between. It can be anything you want it to, just about.

I strongly suggest everyone goes over to http://drupal.org/ and has a quick poke around to familiarise themselves with what's possible there.

The big downer with ning is that it is run by someone else; they could go broke any day and turn out the lights, or start inserting obtrusive ads in the middle of our content, or anything else. Also if we want a feature that ning doesn't offer, there's no way we can extend it's functionality.

With drupal you can create your own customised installation to fit your needs exactly. It's free and there is a huge community of developers who create and maintain plugins for it.