Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Canadians have a strange obsession with dirt and worms, a lot of people received smartphones for Christmas and, on average, people spent 6 milliseconds longer on each page of Te Ara in 2011 than in 2010.

A typical retrospective would look at everything that Te Ara accomplished in 2011, such as publishing 121 new stories. Instead I thought I’d look at our site statistics and see what our millions of users looked at in 2011.

New Zealand

New Zealanders’ three favourite stories were Historic earthquakes, Earthquakes and Active faults, all obviously influenced by the earthquakes in Christchurch, and probably the Japanese earthquake as well. Similarly, two of the top three images were also related to earthquakes:a map of fault lines and a photo of the extinct volcanoes that formed Banks Peninsula. Possibly a sign of the recession: the third most viewed image was a job advertisement used as an example of rural language.

If New Zealanders were looking at those stories and images, what about the rest of the world? (Or at least the five countries that view Te Ara the most.) I’ll leave it to you to consider why these particular stories and images were of interest to visitors from those countries.

United States of America

Favourite stories: Estuaries, Deep-sea creatures and Geothermal energy

Favourite images:

The blobfish

Photosynthesis and chemosynthesis

Estuary food web

Australia

Favourite stories: Historic earthquakes, Tsunamis and Farm dogs

Favourite images:

Active faults

The blobfish

A day at the races

United Kingdom

Favourite stories: Earthquakes, Coastal fish and Sandflies and mosquitoes

Favourite images:

Active faults

Plate boundary

Comparative sizes of whales

Canada

Favourite stories: Papatūānuku – the land, Soils and Earthworms

Favourite images:

Earthworm life cycle

Comparative sizes of whales

Arrow, giant and colossal squid

India

Favourite stories: Earthquakes, Dairying and dairy products, and Conservation – a history.

Favourite images:

The brain drain

Earthworm life cycle

Earthquake-resistant building

Other traffic

It’s always interesting looking at Te Ara’s traffic for the year. You can clearly see events such as the Christchurch earthquake in February, school holidays and the redesign in October.

Overall traffic

Despite our overall traffic going down over December (see above) due largely to school holidays, traffic from mobile devices (smart-phones and tablets) increased (see below).

Traffic from mobile devices

Mobile traffic started increasing dramatically after Christmas. Were a lot of mobile gadgets under the Christmas tree? In 2010 mobile devices only accounted for 1% of Te Ara’s traffic, in 2011 it raised to 3% but since Christmas it’s grown to 8.6%.

Coming up in 2012

Hopefully in 2012 we’ll see fewer natural disasters, so New Zealanders can read less dramatic stories such as Pets, Childhood and our story on our favourite not-that-creepy crawly the Peripatus. Perhaps some of this year’s most popular stories will come from the new stories being added to the Government and Nation theme. Stories on the Second World War, money, the royal family, Kingitanga and New Zealand’s identity will surely spark people’s interest.

Doesn’t ‘normal’ seem so 2011? Perhaps it’s time for something different? Well, check out Street View Stereographic created by Ryan Alexander. It takes Google’s Street View and projects it onto a sphere.

Normal Street View (Kororāreka Bay, Russell)

Sphere View

By distorting the normal view this way, it creates little globes. Buildings stretch out into the sky…

Power lines turn into a fascinating web…

Tunnels become quite trippy…

Auckland Harbour Bridge’s plain curves create an interesting pattern…

Signs hang off precariously…

Roads and rail lines wrap across them…

Here’s some more I couldn’t help sharing, but please comment below and share the best views in New Zealand that you find.

A Wellington intersection

Paritutu Rock and fuel tanks, New Plymouth

Worser Bay, Wellington

A lone house, Worser Bay, Wellington

Heading onto the Auckland Harbour Bridge

Auckland Harbour Bridge (heading the other way)

McKenzie Cove, Northland

Some trees on a back road. Can you see the face?

Queens Parade, Auckland

This post is a quick overview of the Te Ara redesign. I’ll do a more detailed post in a month or two. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

If you take a look at Te Ara today, you’ll find a few things have changed around here. We’ve had a redesign!

Last year we noticed people were having problems navigating through our stories and weren’t noticing some features. Also, anecdotal evidence suggested that many people loved reading Te Ara, but not on screen, which is a bit of a worry … for a website. A full site redesign is always going to be very time consuming and there is temptation to make radical changes. The danger is that radical changes can introduce as many issues as they solve.

However, a lot has changed in the world of the web since Te Ara was first launched in 2005, and we decided it was time for some improvements and a freshen-up.

The redesign keeps many elements from the original Te Ara design, but we made six main changes…

1) Improving the presentation of content

Enlarging the size of the content area meant the size of text could be increased. As well as increasing the font size, the stories now have larger margins, bigger line spacing and other changes that make the text easy to read or scan through. Also, the off-white background used in the redesign reduces eye-strain during long stints of reading, while maintaining ideal text contrast.

2) Better display for the main navigation

Te Ara has a really handy multi-column browser that allows you to find Te Ara’s stories through different categories. Chances are you didn’t know that, as only about 2% of users opened it. In the redesign the first column of categories is displayed as horizontal navigation items.

The categories take you to a new full-page browser that allows for much larger text and longer story names.

3) Better display for the ’short story’

Every story on Te Ara has a ’short story’ – an easy-to-read summary created for younger readers, but which also serves as a quick overview of the full story. The short story (like the browser) was hidden away and (also like the browser) only a small percentage of users found it. To simplify the structure of the stories – and to help people find the short story – we merged it with the story front page.

4) Improve usability

Improving usability was probably the most complicated of the changes. We were lucky to work with Optimal Usability, who helped us resolve some of the issues with the site. We made a lot of changes to the way you navigate each story and how your position in the story is displayed.

5) Modernise the look and feel

After attending Daniel Burka’s ‘Creating simple: Techniques for simplifying your UI and your CSS/HTML’ workshop at Webstock last year, I started considering ways of simplifying Te Ara. I could go into a lot of detail about the changes, but the main change I made to the design was to remove as many unnecessary elements as possible.

The old design had a lot of containers, highlighted above.

In the new design the only containers left outside the main article space are there to group menu elements and increase the text contrast. This goes a long way to making the design feel clean and simple, as well as help users make their way around the different sections of the page.

6) Simplify the HTML & CSS, and speed up the performance of the site

At the same workshop, Daniel showed us a way to use PHP to generate CSS, allowing the use of variables… whoops, I am getting a bit technical. The essence is that Te Ara’s 50 colour schemes could be generated in a much simpler way. We also moved to HTML5 and CSS3, which allow us to drastically reduce the amount of code – this makes the web pages load faster in your browser, and makes it easier for us to change things behind the scenes. CSS3 features such as opacity and rounded corners are only supported by the latest browsers, but degrade gracefully in older browsers.

There are a lot of other techniques we used to improve the performance of the site and we’re still looking at ways to better optimise the new design.

That’s enough from me, go browse the site, read a short story, read a full story or two, explore the images and media, and come back here and let us know what you think.

As a visual person, I love Te Ara because each story is told through images as well as text. We source images from anywhere and everywhere, but mainly through institutions like archives, libraries and museums. As users, you usually only ever see a smaller image that has been optimised for the web. Behind the scenes we are very lucky to see the more detailed version of every image.

However, using a tool called Zoomify we can allow you to zoom in and see all the detail in an image. We have been using it for years, but until now you have only been able to view it in a small window. We’ve recently updated Zoomify, and we’re now adding the ability to view them full-screen as we gain permission from copyright holders.

When viewing the high-res image, especially full-screen, you tend to notice details you’ve never seen before, like the texture of the paper, emotions on faces or the amount of detail that was hand-drawn into text.

So rather than view the image below in a small window, click on the green full-screen button, use the controls to zoom in, and fill your screen with moths (that might not sound particularly appealing, but you will just have to trust me). If you would prefer, we also have the pages covering larvae … and, if you must, butterflies.

Currently there are only around 200 that have the special green button, but we plan to extend it to more images in time. Here is a list of some of the best images that you can now view full-screen:

• Cook’s map of New Zealand, 1773
• New Zealand lighthouses in 1900
• Duck shooting, Lake Ellesmere
• Bird’s eye view of Auckland, 1886
• Ye diggings, 1852
• Kōwhai in London
• The Salvation Army in action: new training school, 1914
• Wellington’s plan, 1840
• Early map of Auckland’s volcanic features, 1865–66

And last but not least is a popular board game from the 1950’s called Holdson’s Educational Tour of New Zealand. Don’t worry if you end up in Palmy, you can immediately advance to Wellington.

Is your favourite image on Te Ara available full-screen? Let us know if it isn’t (or if it is) in the comments below.

(p.s. sorry for picking on you Palmy, you know I love you.)

In the early hours of Saturday a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck just outside of Darfield near Christchurch. You know the story, it has been everywhere for almost a week. On Saturday, if you were not directly affected, you, like me were glued to the media hungry for more information.

New Zealanders surged online for information about the quake. As the day progressed and in the days since, people have been searching out more and more information about earthquakes. GeoNet, a tremendous source of seismic information saw a massive increase in traffic.

Te Ara received more visitors than ever before and our page views doubled:


So what was everyone looking at? Well…

Active faults
The most viewed page by far was this map of active faults. Visitors would have quickly noticed there aren’t any active faults marked near Darfield. Faults are only considered active if they have moved (and broken the earth’s surface) in the past 120,000 years. Kelvin Berryman, manager of the natural hazards platform at GNS Science explains:

‘Before Saturday, there was nothing in the landscape that would have suggested there was an active fault beneath the Darfield and Rolleston areas … Geologists have no information on when the fault last ruptured as it was unknown until last weekend. All we can say at this stage is that this newly revealed fault has not ruptured since the gravels were deposited about 16,000 years ago.’ (http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/News-and-Events/Media-Releases/16000-years)

Due to the interest in the map, I have created a high resolution version and added the epicentre of Saturday’s quake. I’ve also added the 22-km-long surface rupture (fault trace) which represents the previously hidden fault line.

Historic earthquakes
Our Historic earthquakes entry was also popular, perhaps as people tried to put this disaster in context. These were the quakes they were most interested in (in order of page views):

• Edgecumbe – 2 March 1987 – magnitude 5.2
• North Canterbury – 1 September 1888 – magnitude 7.0–7.3
• Wairarapa – 23 January 1855 – magnitude 8.2
• Napier – 3 February 1931 – magnitude 7.8

What causes earthquakes?
As well as information on active faults people were clearly interested in what causes earthquakes and seismic activity in New Zealand. We have a number of diagrams that illustrate various aspects of earthquakes that were amongst the most viewed pages:

• Earthquakes and volcanoes in the subduction zone
• Faults and earthquakes
• Plate boundary through New Zealand
• The earthquake magnitude scale
• Visualising the magnitude scale
• New Zealand earthquakes, 1990–94

That last one is very similar to this animation created by Chris McDowall using information from GeoNet. It visualises six months of New Zealand earthquakes and ends several days after the Darfield quake.

Damage, ruptures and distortion
The Deans family were the first permanent European settlers in the Christchurch area. This photo of their homestead was the sixth most viewed page on the site. The registered historic place, built in the late 1800s, was severely damaged in the quake.

I find the pictures of the damage left by Saturdays quake hard to refer to as stunning, a typically positive term, however they did stun me. Visitors to Te Ara were obviously fascinated by ruptures and land distortion, such as these:

• Fault rupture, 1987 Edgecumbe earthquake
• Sideways movement on the Hope Fault
• Twisted railway tracks, Edgecumbe
• The Edgecumbe Fault

Around the world
There was also a lot of interest from around the world with traffic increasing 50% from the United States, 76% from Australia, 89% from the United Kingdom, 111% from Canada and a whopping 500% increase from the Dominican Republic (which, admittedly was only an increase from 1 visitor last week to 6 visitors this week, so far).

Questions?
We’re pleased that Te Ara’s wide range of information, photos, maps and diagrams about earthquakes was able to help people understand what has been going on in Christchurch over the last few days, but do you have a question that you can’t find an answer to? Let us know in the comments below…