Conscious Manifestations

Today I made some major changes to theFree Wiki top navigation menu, enabling people to quickly sort the wikis by cutom criteria such as license, programing language, whether or not a database is required and what type of database is used.

I have also spent a lot of time testing out Drupal 4.7 beta 5. Once the 4.7 stable release is out, I am going to upgrade to this version as it has a lot of very nice features like tagging posts rather than categorizing them. And that is just the beginning. It will be a stellar upgrade across the board for all the sites.

This will be a major change and will create a lot more easy navigation and will also allow me to more easily add a lot more ways to have the information filtered and sorted on all the sites.

Today I spent quite a while working with my account on Technorati. I claimed five of my blogs (Free Music Software, Anonymous Photo, Free Wiki, Free the Sounds and Free Language).

It takes a while to do it all properly, but I am hoping that this will drive traffic to my sites - traffic that will be people looking for this info that I provide! So it works all around.

It is a good idea to use this sort of service because it is free and it can considerably improve both your placement with the search engines, as well as driving relevant traffic to your site.

I also worked quite a bit on the new Free Reality, which I will release this week and which will use Drupal instead of Geeklog. This is the last site to migrate over to Drupal!

Other sites are in the works, but I have to continue updating the current ones before I get too involved in new ones.

Tomorrow I am going to claim My China Blog, add another software to Free Music Software and add a bunch of stuff to Free Language. Also, I will write some here about the benefits of Feedburner, which is free.

I added Hydrogen to the line-up at Free Music Software today.

Lots going on over at Free Language. It has been my main focus lately and I am very excited about it. I left the first blog entry there today with some good info about the site.

Today I added Beast to Free Music Software.

The line-up grows! I am planning on adding nine more over the next two weeks.

I had the pleasure of meeting Stuart Wilde at an ayahuasca workshop last November. My encounter with him left me feeling empowered - mostly, because I saw that the truth I need to find is inside of me, not inside of someone else.

Through the last decade, Stuart has guided my spiritual life to a great degree. I have looked to his works for answers, truth and hope. I have not been let down.

So when Stuart adds new postings to his website, I get excited! Not just because of the free information (something I am obviously fond of) he provides through that medium, but because it usually contains a nice treat for my "spiritual" life.

Indeed, since January of 2006, he has been pretty active:

The Diana Story Update
Mysterious Orbs
Tales Bounced off the Lonely Road
Free Thinking Helps
The Journey Beyond Enlightenment

Below is an excerpt from this last article:

"The ego creates for itself an ivory tower of self-importance that is sustained by the biophontons in the individual's etheric, and from that place we often expect something or someone to come and raise us up even further. People wait to be discovered or they hope that a great being will appear to raise them up the spiritual ladder towards heaven. It is natural for the ego to seek spiritual importance — it wants to be the chosen one, the specially selected radiant being that is here to redeem the rest of us mere mortals. All of this is very nice but a bit daft." Continue to the article on StuartWilde.com.

Happy reading!

This is a site that I am doing with a wonderful friend of mine... we are traveling the world together, or rather, "transcombouging".

What does it mean to transcombouge? Well, soon you'll be able to find out exactly what it means on the Transcombouge website.

To summarize, to transcombouge has two definitions.

1) That thing you do when you are walking towards someone and you both go the same way to go around and end up having to go back, which of course you do at the same time. Sometimes you go back and forth several times before working out how to pass each other. From time to time, someone might say: "Shall we dance?"

2) Traveling through the world to learn about culture, language, people and the many ways humans (and animals) live. Traveling with an awareness, a purpose and a yearning for knowledge and understanding. The idea is to stay in places long enough to really learn something about them. For different people and different reasons, this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months or even a few years.

More to come at Transcombouge.com, where there are currently some photos and a little funny video.

This is just the beginning of a worldwide movement... stay tuned!

Visit the site!

Not sure why this is, but for a long time I used the SpreadFirefox theme for this website. When I switched over to the current theme, which is based off of Chameleon, all of the categories and posting dates disappeared for all of my old postings. They come up on new ones, but not on the ones that I posted while using the SpreadFirefox theme.

If anyone knows why this might be, please do let me know! I would like to get all of that info back. Plus it kind of crams the page without those nice separators.

Guess I'll just have to post a lot of content! :)

The latest from Free the Sounds:

"OK, this one is going to be brief. I have decided that the best way to do this site and leverage what is out there on the web already is to use archive.org as a space for storing the sounds and this site as a space for collaboration.

Thus, when the new site is released in September 2005, it will have all the info necessary to let users publish their sounds and songs on archive.org and use this site to collaborate and reach out to other musicians.

All of this will be documented in length here. Thanks for the continued patience... soon come."

Soon come, indeed.

From FreetheSounds.org:

"The new server is up and running strong! I have installed a fresh Drupal 4.6.2 install and am currently configuring it to the max for user options galore, categories, personal blogs, syndication, user customization and much more. This will take a few days - you've hung in this long so please be patient just a little while longer.

In addition, a new version of Broadcast Machine has been released and it appears to work flawlessly on the server. I am now setting this up as well so that we can all share torrents for files larger than 3 MB (Under 3 MB can be shared through this part of the site). In addition, once this is up and running, I will be looking into getting a script written that will automatically submit the torrents from this site to Archive.org, in order that they be readily accesible for fast downloads.

I am working lots on all of this, and the result should be up by the end of July, beginning of August.

We will have a sweet and simple, super light-weight theme that improves the navigation and the loading time.

For now, please bookmark this site and come back at the beginning of August!

Look forward to collaborating with you all soon..."

Visit Free the Sounds

Well... I have not managed to get either BlogTorrent or Broadcast Machine to work properly on Free the Sounds. This has made me think a lot about how to best manage the sounds on this site.

I have looked around and found a hosting company that will help me out on this project with a really great price for a relatively large storage capacity and bandwidth.

Thus I have decided to host the sounds on the server with the site, and to also offer the option to upload a torrent file for those who are able to do this. Thus, we will have the best of both worlds on the site!

These changes are currently in the making and the site should be up and running within a week with a whole new version of Drupal, a new look and feel (very slick, lightweight and fast loading) and on a totally new server with mega space.

Don't lose faith - this project is very near being fully operational, so please add Free the Sounds to your bookmarks and come back soon to share and download sounds.

Thanks for your continued patience. :)

Yes, all of these things have been added to the site. Regarding the ads, I put them up because it is a way to help way-lay the server fees.

With an overwhelming majority of 684 to 13 (19 abstentions), the European Union has once again voted against the Software Patent Directive. This is great news for the Free Software community and, given the incredible balance against the directive, certainly sets a precedent for things to come.

Slashdot.org Article
The Register Article
MSN Money Article

Hooray for the EU for not stifling innovation!

Slashdot.org's RSS feed has just been added to the aggregator for the site. I also stuck a block on the right side for the last five feeds to be displayed there. Slashdot has a variety of info and they usually cover most of the pertinent technology-related stuff, so I thought it fitting.

Today I have been making some changes to the site, adding the aggregator feeds for Archive.org, Free the Sounds and demosoftware.net.

I am still working on the category structure and the associated vocabulary.

Drupal is just incredible. If you want a world-class website hosted by a company that gives back to the Free Software community, please visit Lightservers.net and sign up for one of their plans. Lightservers.net and the Drupal team are doing quite a service for humankind.

More coming soon.