A brief history of the Pakuranga and Panmure bridges (1865-2023)

The Auckland suburb where we live has had its fair share of bridges. Before a bridge, the only way to cross the Tamaki River was “by a leaky and somewhat unreliable punt which frequently had a broken chain or was holed. Delays of up to an hour could occur when stock were crossing. The average …

Easter Sunrise Service 2023

In God’s kindness, this year I had the joy of helping with organising the annual East Auckland Combined Churches Easter Sunrise service. As mentioned before by Rev Richard Waugh (who helped to start these sunrise services over 30 years ago), it’s a small but significant opportunity to partner with other local churches to share our …

How to manually clean up weird punctuation, and scrambled non-English characters on WordPress

Oh, WordPress. This was not how I had intended to work on paratext over the summer! It seems like our 10+ years hosting platform stored years and years worth of blog posts on this website using some kind of non-UTF-8 character set. However, after our hosting provider moved this website’s backend to a new server …