Northern Rhodesians Worldwide

Recent Site Updates

• Added a 1959 map of the Kariba Hydro-electric Scheme Township and Works Area on the south side of the Zambezi, courtesy of GNR member Hartley Heaton, to the maps page. (Look under "Maps of Other Countries and Cities of Interest".)
• Revamped the much-neglected news page with BBC news feeds for Zambia, Africa, and the world, and removed outdated and non-functioning news and weather feeds and links. These feeds are updated every fifteen minutes. The Zambian feed is not really an actual feed, but the results of an automated search for news containing the word "Zambia". Therefore, as you can see at the moment with the first story being one about Zimbabwe, some results may not be about Zambia and some may be quite old. I'll be monitoring this to see how useful it is.
• In case nobody noticed it, we hit one thousand images in the Boma yesterday. There are thousands more images on the site, but they are slowly making their way into the Boma, where they will be more easily found.

• All Names Directory profiles now include a table of information on how active a member is on the GNR. For now it contains only two pieces of information: the link to the member's contributions to the Boma suggested by Sue Coughlan recently, and the number of messages the member has posted on the message board since March 2005. In the case of the former, tagging contributions to work with this system will be a work in progress and will take time, and so for all but a handful of members these links will lead to an empty page. In the case of the latter, only messages posted since March 2005 are automatically tallied because it was at that time that the message board started using a database.
• We have started tagging and grouping contributions, and the names of contributors will appear on the "Contributors" page as this progresses.
• To make them easier to find, a link has been added to the sidebar menu to recent updates in the Boma.
• Fixed a number of problems with the Names Directory editing form that were brought to my attention by Deryck Wilson. The form was down for most of about twelve hours, but is available once again. If you recently updated your entry but some information you entered didn't take, please try again.
• Fixed a few minor issues with the display of individual messages on the message board.
• Removed most of the internal SSL links on the site, as they were only complicating a log-in/log-out process that is still a bit buggy. As mentioned previously, the programming that runs the GNR does really need to be rewritten from the ground up, and one of the symptoms of this is some strange behaviour by the log-in/log-out system occasionally. None of the information on the GNR is sensitive enough to demand the use of SSL, and it was just a nicety. However, it remains available, and can and will be used a necessary.
• There has been some activity in the Boma recently, so please check out the details.

• Added two excellent maps courtesy of GNR member John Waters to the maps page. Both are in PDF format and so will print very well. Both are diagrammatic maps, and one is a road map of Zambia, and the other is a road map of Chililabombwe, formerly Bancroft.
• As all content from the old "After Livingstone..." and "Northern Tales" sections of the site has now been moved to the Boma, the old addresses for those pages now redirect to the same articles in their new locations, or to the respective category pages in the Boma.
• Membership reactivations will now be posted on the message board occasionally to illustrate the fact that this is happening all the time.
• Fixed a bug in the HTML code that was causing the sidebar to become wider than it should have been in Microsoft Internet Explorer if there was very little text in the main part of the page. (Actually, this is a bug in Internet Explorer, and the correction is to counteract that bug.)

• In answer to a question, added a page of statistics covering message board posts from 1999-2007. This is a snapshot as of today; if it is updated at sometime in the future, it will probably only be updated annually.

• When logging in via the log-in bar at the top of the page, you are now automatically directed back to the page you were on when you logged in. (Thanks to Hartley Heaton for pointing out that this was a better way of doing things, and for his help in identifying other problems.) There are still a few issues surrounding logging out, but they are more annoying than problematic.
• The page that you used to see when you logged in is now referred to as "Your Account" in the member links on the right. I'll see if I can think of a better name for it, but this page will develop to contain links to things that you can do once logged in. Right now there are really only two things you can do once logged in (post a message or edit your Names Directory entry), but hopefully there will be more in the not-too-distant future.
• The pages that display individual messages (e.g., "Recent Site Updates") now use the subject of the message as the title of the page. As with other changes recently, this will make search results more useful and descriptive.
• Section menus in those parts of the site that use them now have a heading that I hope will make them more visible and their purpose clearer. A section menu is a horizontal menu of links near the top of the page that contains links pertinent to the section you are browsing. They are the second horizontal blue band that you see across the width of the page in most parts of the site outside the Boma.

• After a short absence (of, oh, the better part of a decade), the GNR once again has a site search engine. I am not fond of using off-site, third-party services, but Google needs our help in their quest to dominate the world and so we're using their excellent search technology. And yes, that is advertising that you see in some of the results; the same advertising you see when you use the Google search engine itself. Please note that there is one limitation to this interim measure: any information that you must log in to see will not show up in the search results, because the search engine cannot log in to index them. This means that message boards prior to April 2002 and the information that is now private in the Names Directory will not be indexed. However, these results will include the Boma, although the Boma does also have its own internal search engine.
• The issues with the log-in bar at the top of the page are mostly fixed. It will show you as logged in if you are logged in, or display the log-in boxes if you are not. However, for some reason, when you click "log out", the log-in bar will say that you are still logged in, although you really are logged out. Clicking on any other link on the page (or the "log out" link a second time) will reveal that you are indeed already logged out. I have a good idea what is causing this, but it would require some significant work to fix. Instead, the GNR is in need of a "code enema" which I hope to work on within the next... umm... while.
• Once you've logged in using the log-in bar, there is a bold link on the resulting page that will take you back to the page from where you logged in.
• Revised the registration and editing processes slightly to reflect the fact that some information is now hidden from public view.
• Reinstated the page to edit your Names Directory entry. If you experience any issues with this, please let me know.
• If you are logged in, the contact form now automatically fills in your name and email address.
• Further security improvements to the registration and editing processes.
• Converted all dates in the Names Directory (which includes the obituaries) to use the standard long-date format in effect on the rest of the site.
• Numerous minor updates to the site template, including:
  • Changed the format of the page title (the title you see in the title bar of your browser) to comply with current conventions and improve the usability of search results.
  • Added a small search box in the sidebar to search the site, as well as a link to the main search page.
  • Reinstated the links to the old sections of the site, as they have not been transferred to the Boma yet.
  • Broke the menu in the sidebar into smaller sections.
  • Added today's birthdays to the footer.

• Certain private information (specifically date of birth, family information and anything more specific than the country where you live) is now hidden from public view in the Names Directory by default, and is only shown to members once they are logged in.
• Similar information is also hidden from view on the message board unless you are logged in. For the last couple of years this information has been hidden from everyone when viewing the message board, but it is once again visible when you are logged in.
• There is now a log-in bar at the top of every page on the site except the Boma. When you are logged in, instead of the log-in boxes you will see your name and a "log out" link. A few bugs still need to be worked out to get this to work properly, but you can now log in from almost anywhere on the site.
• There is now a way to log out other than by closing your browser -- the aforementioned "log out" link (which you will only see, of course, if you are logged in) in the blue bar at the top of the page.
• Some security refinements have been made to some areas of the Names Directory.
• After logging in, the site now does a better job of letting those members with a non-working email address know that the only thing they can do once logged is update their Names Directory entry. Previously, even if you logged in with the correct user ID and password, if you logged in to do anything other than edit your entry you would be told that your access was denied, but you wouldn't be told why.
• A number of visual refinements have been made to the display of information in Names Directory entries.
• Notes and disclaimers have been added to the foot of every Names Directory entry.
• Some of these changes have caused a problem with the form to edit your Names Directory entry, so it has been taken offline until this is fixed. It should be back in a day or two.

• The links page has been completely revamped and is now database-based, so it's much easier and quicker to update, and split over several pages, so it loads more quickly. Several new links have been added, and some existing links have been updated or removed. Three new icons highlight some sites: a "new" icon to show sites that have been added in the last thirty days (which is updated automatically, so it won't say "new" long after the thirty days are over); a clickable icon next to sites that are owned or run by or associated with a GNR member; and an icon to indicate sites that are clients of NinerNet Communications. (For the next thirty days, all sites are marked as "new", as they were all added to the database yesterday.)
• Have completely dealt with the year-long backlog of email, membership activations, and various other administrative duties that were neglected to varying degrees over the last year.
• Updated the updates page and archived all of the updates and news from 2005 and 2006.

• Published breakdowns of the GNR membership by country as of this date, one list sorted by number of members and the other alphabetically by country.

• A new version of the Nkana-Kitwe interactive map from 1961 (first digitised by Dave Cooper in 1997) has been placed on the GNR after many hours of testing, and the writing and rewriting of instructions.

• Added a map to the registration page to assist those poor Bamba Zonkes who failed history and/or geography.

• Add automated daily announcements to the message board listing the names of members that have updated their Names Directory entries within the last 24 hours.

• Cleared the vast majority of the backlog of pending members -- 614 of them. All other backlogged pending memberships and email not answered in the last year will be dealt with in the coming weeks.
• Add automated daily announcements to the message board listing the names of new members activated within the last 24 hours.

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