This page contains a bunch of links to other interesting Hamilton-related web pages. No doubt they will all be broken soon enough. There are no pictures. I really only made it because the front page is getting a bit cluttered. If it sounds a bit much for you, then you can always return to Hamilton.
...there was waikato.general, a newsgroup devoted to chat about the university and the city. I was reading this in 1992; but it has been around longer than that. These days there's a nz.reg.hamilton.general too, I think.
What appears to be the official Hamilton Visitor Information page, where "Hamilton gets wired" is a little bare; it has been "Coming Soon to a Web Browser near you" for about three years now.
The Hamilton event guide has been around for almost as long, but I have yet to find it useful.
The McKay family virtual tour of Hamilton was the first page to really get Hamilton on the net. Many people don't like it, for some reason, but the guestbook contains both positive and negative reviews. As Chris N-B writes in the guestbook: "Wa-hoo, the enthusiasm overcame the spelling! Good to see some local content!"
Note: I recently been accused me of fabricating this page as some sort of bizarre Opotiki joke, a charge that honesty forces me to deny.
The Hamilton site you are now reading made its debut. So did Tim's Guide to Places of Food.
The Hamilton Public Library launched their fine web site, with links to local places and a splendid local history.
The imaginatively-titled hamiltoncity.co.nz appeared, and after tantalising us with a pretty business card for a few weeks, went live on April 24, 1999. How do I know? I read it in the "Positive Times." I haven't been over all of this site yet (I couldn't summon the enthusiasm) but it looks nice enough. It's certainly the best place, at this point in time, to look up Hamilton if you're some sort of tourist, or if you want to know what the weather is like without going outside. It will be updated daily, or so they say, and I approve.
The "Positive Times", for your information, is "A special publication to celebrate the positive aspects of our community." If you live in Hamilton and haven't seen a copy, then you probably threw it out without looking at it. For some reason, they did not mention my Hamilton web pages. Oh well. There's always next issue.
The same article introduced hamilton.net.nz, a web site that you can find out about in the paper, but not on the internet. Hamilton "will have one of the world's largest city sites" say the organisers, but not until December. "We see this is a valuable long term community project", they say. Quite.
If you visit their web site you see a single front page, introducing you to "Hamilton, City of Innovation", a funny little form, and a hit counter that's an order of magnitude ahead of mine, despite the fact that they have no content.
But I'm not bitter.
What a difference a year makes. Hamilton now has several very slick, very functional web sites, and the number of businesses with a web presence is probably approaching the hundreds. The main Hamilton city information sites are:
As a general rule, these sites ignore each other's presence, and ignore me all the more. I did get a nice message from the HamiltonInfo webmaster requesting a link to his page since he had linked to me, but I never did find that link. Oh well.
Oh, and I got an email message from the former editor of the "Positive Times", who so callously ignored me last year. She would have included me, she explained, if she had only known I that I existed. It's the story of my life, really.
The Hitchhikers Guide to New Zealand: This is the first and finest New Zealand FAQ. Accept no imitations. It was around before the web, and will be here when the web is gone. Written in 1991, never updated, and still accurate.
If you're interested in seeing something of the Waikato region, you might start with the Waikato ecotourism pages.
A quick scan of the obvious places to put Hamilton pages reveals that www.hamilton.co.nz is owned by a bunch of domain-name speculators in Wellington, who want to get rich by leasing out such gems as lawyer.co.nz, australia.co.nz and pizza.co.nz.
www.hamilton.com is the property of a company in Palo Alto that specialises in high-tech public relations. This site is of little use, unless you're curious to know whether it's raining in California.
www.hamilton.org has been "registered by a WebCom customer and reserved for future use."
www.hamilton.net is the homepage of a telecommunications company in Aurora, Nebraska.
...you're several years too late. Sorry.