Wellington Area Trail Riding Club deeply appreciates the support of its sponsors, and encourages members and friends to support them in return.

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Index to links page sections

Links to sites of interest to horse owners and people interested in horses
Body protectors and rider safety equipment and practices
Cross link requests
Other equine products
Old website on Geocities

Links for geeks and webmasters
RSS and site validation tools
Secure web page techniques
GPS and mapping tools


Links to other sites, especially deep links, are prone to break as the sites are redeveloped, upgraded, pruned of old content, or simply close down. If you find a broken link, please let the webmaster know so that we can find an alternative source of information.

Horse Talk - news, articles, classified advertisements and more.

The Riding Room - news, articles, classified advertisements and more.

New Zealand Riding Clubs & Bridleways of NZ Incorporated

Te Marua Horse Club Inc - Adult riding club based at Birchville Park, Upper Hutt

Equestrian Sports New Zealand (formerly NZ Equestrian Federation) - As a result of a vote taken at the AGM held on Sunday 15 June 2008, WATRC will cease its affiliation to the ESNZ. Club events will not count towards kilometre or points awards or national championship qualification criteria. For the time being events will continue to be conducted under the relevant portions of the ESNZ rules (Pink Book).

The Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) is the international controlling body for  Equestrian sport.

The Wairarapa Endurance & CTR Club website

The Waikato Endurance Club website

The Ruahine Endurance Club  website

The Delight Arab Horse Stud  website

The Morrocco Arabians website

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BETA Standard for Body Protectors explained - if you're considering purchase of a second hand body protector, you need to review this page. As a general guide, you should not buy a body protector that is more than 5 years old, as the shock absorbing materials deteriorate with age, affording you less protection in the event of a fall. The current standard is the BETA 2000 standard. Look for these labels. We suggest you avoid any Body Protector manufactured to the 1995 standard or prior standards. While they will probably afford some protection, you're possibly not getting the level of protection you're looking for. BETA is the British Equestrian Trade Association, and their site contains some useful information on choosing and fitting riding safety equipment.

The New Zealand Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) has some useful pages on riding safely and riding safety equipment.

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For link or cross-link requests, or to report broken links, please send email to

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If you're considering "barefoot" riding, or your horse is being treated for a hoof problem, you may be looking for an equine boot. As it happens, one of our members is a local  agent for Old Macs Multi-purpose Horse Boots.
Contact Lynne Moore for more information

Head2Tail Horse Products - Boots for horses, saddle blankets, girth sleeves, jackets, neck warmers. Contact BJ French 063299733

Horse Tack NZ - Importers of equestrian products for the comfort & therapy of the NZ horse & rider

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To view the old website, click here. The old site is no longer being updated and no further content will be imported from it.

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Horsey folk may wonder at some of the links that follow, which without any exaggeration, are more than a little "geeky". The reason they're here is because webmasters change, and having inherited a few websites in my time, I know the value of basic tools and documentation, and that they're seldom passed on to you ;-)

So the purpose here is to provide some links to tools that may assist future WATRC webmasters, or any club member who finds themselves responsible for the maintenance of a website.

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Items of interest to members are advised via our Blog which also automatically updates our RSS feed - copy the link under this icon into your reader, and you'll always know when the webmaster has added new content (provided he updates the feed, of course ;-)

RSS News Readers. There are many RSS readers available for download - some are free, some are not. Some are browser plug-ins, others are products in their own right. Quality and features vary. You can use a search engine to find any number of them and decide what works best for you.

If you've upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2, then you will find that both have built-in RSS Readers and you need not do anything more than click on the link and subscribe to the feed - how easy is that!

To check the validity of our Blogger.com generated  feed, we use an on-line feed validator service. Click the image below to check the WATRC RSS feed.

While on the subject of validators, here's a handy Cascading Style Sheet validator we use to check our own CSS files. We focus on eliminating errors, but don't worry too much about warnings. Click the image below to check the WATRC CSS file.

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Ihug has some useful information about how to secure access to web pages on Unix systems. Although Ihug are not our ISP, I've tried their advice and it appears to work for the WATRC host. For the sake of experiment I've created a "Members only" and "Administrator only" area on our website. There's nothing of interest in them - just a blank web page to prove the concept, and of course, without a userid and password, you can't get to them anyway - but trust me, they work ;-)

Incidentally, if you need a text editor that can produce the Unix compatible files required to implement secured pages, NoteTab Light does a fine job.

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The use of GPS and navigational equipment in CTR rides is now prohibited under the NZEF rules. Where possible, WATRC provides indicative trail maps for ride venues, but these are constructed based on GPS tracks recorded by non-competitors, supplemented by hand drawn extensions to trails where the route is well defined.

A number of tols are used in the construction of the maps and profiles. Here are some useful links.

TUMONZ (The Ultimate Map of New Zealand) is a product by a kiwi company that is truely ground breaking. With the standard version alone, you can import data direct from your GPS or from files that are in the GPX format and apply it to the map. Check our trails page for examples. You can probably do the same with the new Google Earth, although I think you may need the subscription version.

For me, the hard bit was getting the GPX format. The Garmin Forerunner model 201 I used previously, exports from the free Logbook utility to a proprietary XML schema. The model 301  I currently use exports from the free Training Centre utility to a similar proprietary XML schema - in both cases I needed a way to convert this to the standard GPX schema.

We're very grateful to those members of the Internet community who share the fruits of their personal labours. Without them, there would be a lot of "wheel reinvention" being practiced. A bit of "googling" quickly turned up this excellent piece of free software, gbls.exe that does exactly the conversion to GPX format required for the model 201 data. Another useful little tool for converting an XML file into tab delimited formats suitable for import into spreadsheets and other applications, xmlexcel can be found here.

Since upgrading to the model 301, I've found the free foreconv utility does an excellent job also, and is a much more flexible product as you can tailor the conversion to your needs by modifying the input and output XML schemas.