Conscious Manifestations

I am happy to announce the release of Free Language v2. Read the release announcement on Free Language.

This site is a major upgrade from v1, which was mostly just me putting language-learning resources together. The idea behind v2 is that a community will start to form that is interested in learning languages and letting people know about the best places online, methods and resources for this. Soon I will be integrating a voting aspect to the site.

For now it is possible to comment on the listing there, as well as find podcasts, blogs, links, websites and more resources for learning the following 12 languages:

• Learn Arabic
• Learn Cantonese
• Learn English
• Learn French
• Learn German
• Learn Hindi
• Learn Italian
• Learn Japanese
• Learn Mandarin Chinese
• Learn Portuguese
• Learn Russian
• Learn Spanish

For all the Drupalers out there, the site is running Drupal 4.7 and I used the following contributed modules:

• aggregator2
• captcha
• emailpage
• google analytics
• insert_block
• pathauto (to the max)
• poormanscron
• simplenews
• sitemenu
• tagadelic

I am going to upgrade to Drupal 5 as soon as I can get some funds together to commission the upgrade of aggregator2 to Drupal 5. Or perhaps someone will decide to just do it!

Here is a screenshot of the Mandarin Chinese Tags Page:

I just finished revamping Mandarin Chinese Info. I gave it a fresh look and restructured a lot of content to make it easy for users to upload content and tag it on the fly.

Of course, there aren't any users yet, because that is another thing that just changed! Hopefully, some people will try it out and make some posts about Mandarin Chinese, or at least comment anonymously.

Really, as always, it is up to the users to join and make it happen.

Here is a screenshot:

I just launched Opal Myth.

From the site:

"This website is an experiment in an online method of organizing one's many interests and pursuits in one place using Drupal."

An interesting idea... Drupal is really quite versatile. I am interested to see how it works out.

The site makes heavy use of Drupal's native Aggregator module to manage feeds of interest.

Keeping it as simple as possible, the only extra modules used were:

• poormanscron
• pathauto
• tagadelic
• upload preview

Here is a screenshot:

Hot off the press! Drupal 5 is now out!

Also of note is that Drupal 5 was released on the Drupal project's 6th birthday. Happy b-day.

A lot of people have put in an amazing amount of work to release Drupal's best version yet. Version 5 is a huge upgrade including a slick new theme that is customizable within Drupal itself.

Great work and congrats to the Drupal community and the Free Software community in general. Drupal is an outstanding example of the incredible power of truly Free Software (GPL).

I just launched another web project for Heart of the Initiate, the folks who do the ayahuasca healing retreats in Brazil.

This site consists mostly of web feeds about ayahuasca aggregated into Drupal using the aggregator2 modules.

Here is a screenshot:

Other modules used include:

• tagadelic
• sitemenu
• pathauto
• poormanscron
• captsch
• textimage

The theme is a basic theme based off of the foliage theme.

The site was built with Drupal 4.7.4.

Find out about ayahuasca!

Drupal 4 RC1 was announced today!

Shouldn't be long until the stable release is out...

This just in:

"Hot off the gossip wire: IBM is falling for Drupal. Hmmmm. ECM leader IBM has developed a series of nine tutorials for Open Source CMS Drupal. And as it turns out, Drupal runs rather well on IBM Linux servers while plugged-into IBM’s DB2 Express-C database. The final tutorial covers just exactly how to do that..."

Read more at CMS Wire.

Free Language was recently upgraded to Drupal 4.7 - lots of new goodies come with that upgrade.

I also chose a new theme for the site... it is pretty much the default foliage theme, with just a change to the header.

There is a V2 release in the making, which will drastically upgrade the site on all levels, and enable much better categorization and location of desired information.

Here is a screenshot:

Look out for a big change coming soon...

Visit Free Language

Here is a screenshot of the new SynthWise v2:

The rest is straight from the SynthWise blog:

Well... it has been a long one today. I just finished updating the theme for this site entirely. It used to be a drab, boring sort of default Drupal theme.

Now it is a nice spinoff of the gunmetal theme. I had to make a lot of tweaks to get it right, but now it is solid.

Just for posterity's sake, and archiving purposes, here is a screenshot of the old theme:

I think the new theme is more fitting for the genre of this site.

I will be working more frequently on this site once I get a few other of my websites revamped, including Free Language, Free Wiki and Free Music Software. These are all using the same basic theme that the old SynthWise theme was. Time for a change!

More to come soonish...

And also:

Forgot to mention the new features.

Basically, there are a few tweaks to the existing features, and then one new feature.

The tweaks involve the Drupal aggregator2 module. I had to switch some things around so that all incominf syndicated articles would be properly categorized.

The new feature is that now comments are open the the public! There is a captcha that is a simple addition problem which I hope will help control spam. I invite your comments!

That's most of the meat.

I just launched Free Parkour, a site that currently syndicates parkour-related photos from Flickr.

In the near future, I will be adding RSS feeds for parkour videos, parkour-related news and more.

The site uses Drupal to do its thing.

Have a look!

I have launched SynthWise, a site that syndicates web content regarding synthesizers and sound design. The easiest way to get to the info that interests you is to check out the tags.

The site uses Drupal to work its wonders.

Have a look!

IBM DeveloperWorks published a nice article in which they explain why they would choose Drupal to "design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site" when compared to may other options such as Ruby on Rails, Mambo, Textpattern, Moveable Type, WordPress and others.

Read the aricle here.

A "Tip of the Trade" was released today on ServerWatch.com regarding Drupal. I thought I would share it here:

"Deploying and using it may not be completely painless, but Drupal is a great content management system (CMS) framework that is lightweight, modular, and not too difficult to navigate. There is nothing exotic or excessively "creative" in its construction — it's just a nice sensible implementation of PHP and either PostgreSQL or MySQL on the back end. What can you do with Drupal?

For starters, see it in action at such large and demanding sites as, Kerneltrap.org, CafePress, and The Onion.

The Top Drupal Sites page demonstrates what people are doing with Drupal. In a nutshell, anything that can delivered over the Web can be managed with Drupal: standard HTML pages, RSS feeds, blogs, threaded discussion forums, polls, software distribution, image galleries, multimedia, documentation ... you name it.

Although Drupal works just fine for a lone control-freak administrator, it is designed to allow many people to contribute and manage content. Its appearance is customizable. Don't be one of the lazy ones who doesn't bother to change the logo when setting up a Drupal site. Presumably, you want visitors to see your identity, not Drupal's.

Drupal even comes with tools to help the site survive a Slashdotting, should you be so "fortunate" as to be discovered by the Slashdot crowd. It makes clever use of caching and throttling to keep the site alive until the tidal wave retreats.

Because of Drupal's modular design, you can start small with just the core features, then add or create more as you need them. Visit Drupal.org to find downloads, excellent documentation, and a busy, helpful user community."

View the original article here.

Intended Audience

This article is intended for people interested in having a powerful and flexible web presence, but with little knowledge of how to do so. Many of the people that will benefit from this article won't even know what Drupal is... yet.

The intended audience may be interested in creating or updating a website, or in having one deployed by a qualified Drupal developer. Both will benefit from the information and concepts that follow.

I have chosen not to put links throughout the whole article in order to avoid distraction. Instead, I have put links at the end of the article that will help readers find more information regarding the content.

I have added clarifications for potentially new terms throughout the article. Simply hover over the words with a dotted line underneath (like these words) to reveal the additional information.

Preliminaries: Covering General Concepts

In order for the reader to understand why Drupal is a wonderful solution for creating "powerful and flexible" websites that will excel in today's web world, some general concepts must first be addressed. Without a basic understanding of the concepts that follow (which might be as basic as knowing that they exist), it is impossible to grasp how Drupal can be of service when creating a web presence.

We are in the Era of Web 2.0: The Interactive Web

Web 2.0. There are lots of explanations of what this means, but the (very) basic concept is that the web is transforming into something driven by the users themselves. This means anyone surfing the web. You. Your aunt. Your neighbor. A kid in China. And so on...

Times are changing and it is no longer simply the "webmasters" or website owners themselves that are controlling the web. The web is an interactive world.

Web 2.0 is the world of web syndication, podcasting, tagging, social networking, photo sharing, social bookmarking, blogs and wikis galore... and, yes, much more.

Web 2.0 Is An Ally

It is advisable for you to be familiar with (and hopefully even care about) these concepts because as you prepare to release a website into this world, you want to be releasing something that will not only fit in, but also stand out.

Websites that stand out keep the interest of their users.

Websites that keep the interest of their users stand the test of time.

Not only that, but word about and links to these sites circulate more quickly and effectively. For example, if a user likes a page on your site and wants to share it with others, your site will provide tools for them to not only share that article (through social bookmarking or social networking services), but also to syndicate the entire contents of your site with only a few clicks. Once syndicated, your site will start to receive hits from places you never imagined, your traffic will increase and your smile will widen.

Drupal Is Your Friend

Drupal is your friend for many reasons.

Drupal and Web 2.0

The wonderful world of interactive Web 2.0 can be harnessed with a flexible web software such as Drupal.

Drupal does things out of the box that allow you to quickly and easily accomplish such feats as managing a blog or online journal (or several), dishing out a podcast, using keywords to tag your information, syndicating and being syndicated and (you guessed it) much more.

Of course, all of these options might not be interesting to you. You don't have to use them all! Drupal lets you pick and choose what you want to use, and what you don't. That's part of the beauty.

Drupal Adds Loads of Goodness to your Website

Drupal makes lots of things a lot easier.

• Structuring your site's content.
• Optimizing for search engine compliance and friendliness.
• Allowing your site to be indexed and searched effectively.
• Allowing multiple users to edit your site.
• Localizing your site for multiple languages.
• Managing discussion forums.
• Implementing polls for user feedback.

This is only a (very) partial list of the out-of-the-box functionality that Drupal has. This doesn't even take into consideration the loads of contributed modules that enhance this core functionality.

Below is a small partial list of what these can allow you to do.

• Create image galleries.
• Use Google AdSense and Amazon.com for revenue generation.
• Manage an online store.
• Maintain an ongoing list of events.
• Use a basic wiki within your Drupal site.
• Create printer-friendly and emailable pages.
• Manage a project or projects.
• Enable enhanced site statistics tools.

Drupal is Dynamic

Content in Drupal is powered by a database. Look-and-feel, or design, is stored separately as files. This in an important separation because it s flexible, fast and "dynamic". Your content can be updated without worrying about design. Your design can be changed without touching the content.

This differs from the "old way" of doing things (which is still used quite a bit) which stored both of these in the same place: on a file. This mean that if you wanted to update the design of the whole site, you had to change every page! Or if you wanted to restructure some of the navigation bars or content, you had to restructure every single page!

Drupal's separation of content and design allows for a level of power and flexibility that puts websites in a category of their own.

Drupal Does Not Lock You In

Since Drupal is so widely used and so many individuals and firms are familiar with it, you are not locked in by a custom website that nobody but the person who designed it knows how to run.

This means that if your web developer decides to retire to an isolated island in the South Pacific, your website can easily be taken over by anyone else familiar with Drupal.

With thousands and thousands of websites using Drupal (and more being released all the time) and a substantial development and user community behind it, you have plenty of available resources to find others capable of handling upgrades, customizations and other web development tasks for you.

Drupal is Your Webmaster's Friend

If you you are not interested in managing your site yourself once it is launched, Drupal will make the life of your webmaster much easier. All of the features above add up to a site that is easily-manageable by people who wouldn't even consider themselves "webmasters".

Updating your site can be as easy as logging in, clicking, writing and clicking again.

Drupal is Your Web Developer's Friend

You might want to set up and configure Drupal yourself. Then again, you might not! Drupal is used by web developers around the world to implement world class websites that manage loads of content and serve a multitude of users.

Drupal is friendly to your web developer (and to you!) because it is truly Free Software.

Drupal is Free Software

Drupal is released under a license call the GNU General Public License. Very simply, this license protects and empowers a software because it is owned by the general public and free to be examined and altered at all levels. Drupal can be truly understood and implemented by web developers because they not only have access to the code at its source, but are also free to modify and enhance it.

Basically, this means that you can do anything you want to the program itself to make it what you need it to be.

This is good for your web developer because s/he can truly customize Drupal for your specific needs.

Not only does Drupal have all of the core and contributed functionality listed above (and much more) but - because of its license - it also allows for customization at all levels.

Drupal has been developed from the start with the idea of flexibility in mind. This means from the inherent flexibility of its very license to flexibility in function and design.

Drupal Knows What You Want/Need Your Website to Do

Most people have an idea of what they would like their website to do. That is why they are looking for a website or a website upgrade in the first place.

Many of my clients come to me with lots of ideas. They usually walk away with a lot more!

All I do is take them through a few of the things that Drupal can do for them... their eyes widen, their synapses fire and they walk away with a new idea of what their website can be.

The community that is constantly working on Drupal knows what people need their websites to do. They are not employees designing an abstract system. They are people who have websites themselves. They are people who needed an extra feature that Drupal didn't have, so they wrote it and contributed it to the community. Then others came along, liked it, used it and improved it.

This approach means that Drupal does more than what people thought they needed and wanted their website to do. Its very design opens up new doors, sparks new ideas and leaves people with a versatile website with a long shelf-life.

Speaking of this...

Let Drupal Do Future Planning For You

You most likely have a general idea about what you want your website to do now, but there are certainly things you'll want or need in a year or two that you don't want or need now. Planning for something you don't know you want or need is quite nearly impossible.

Then again...

Drupal can help with this! I don't mean the web software alone, I mean the greater Drupal community that is constantly and consistently upgrading, patching, searching for new concepts and ideas to integrate, implementing new modules for the latest and most desirable features on the web, updating tired themes to incorporate the developing web standards, and so on.

This is more than any single person or web developer can possible hope to achieve. Yet this is what a living, breathing, free software web application community is doing right now. In fact, Drupal has most likely been improved since you started reading this article!

It sounds amazing because it is amazing.

You want Drupal because Drupal constantly works on and improves itself.

Links for Further Information

Drupal Links

The Official Drupal Website
Browse Drupal's Contributed Modules
Browse Drupal's Contributed Themes
See What Languages Drupal is Ready For
View the Drupal Handbooks
Drupal Forums
Drupal Support
Drupal on Wikipedia
Drupal Showcase Website - Find Websites that Use Drupal

Web 2.0 Links

Info about Web 2.0
What is Web 2.0? - Article from O'ReillyNet.com
Info about Web Syndication
Info about Podcasting
Info about Blogging
Info about Wikis
Info about Content Management Systems
Info about Social Bookmarking
Information about Keyword Tagging

Free Software Links

GNU Website
Free Software Foundation
Free Software on Wikipedia
The GNU General Public License

Drupal-Related Books

As I am familiarizing myself with Drupal 4.7, I am finding the Lullabot Podcasts to be most valuable. Not only do they provide great information, but they are also well done! Bravo!

For instance, you can catch a video podcast on how to update to Drupal 4.7, listen to a recent podcast that talks about the new Content Construction Kit (CCK) or if you're a newbie to Drupal, learn how to install Drupal 4.7. There is a lot more there, too.

This is all great info!

I have been traveling around Central Europe for a month, then moving back to the States for a while. Thus, I have not been posting info here lately. I left the aggregator going, though, for fresh info to be on the site. ;)

At any rate, I figure I owe those people out there who are interested an explanation about what is happening with cmanifestations.net and all the other sites that I have in this network including freewiki.info, freemusicsoftware.info, freelanguage.org, freethesounds.org, anonymousphoto.com, mandarinchinese.info, woodriff.org, freereality.org and mychinablog.com. Not to mention the many more that I have in the works and have no released just yet.

Well... here goes.

I am going, little by little, to update or just plain start over, with each of the sites using the newly updated and really sweet Drupal 4.7 content management system (galore). I want to keep up the work with putting lots and lots of information out on the web for free - info that has to do with the things I am most interested in. I think that if it works out to make a living by putting free information on the web, researching what I love and having a few (unobnoxious) text ads and affiliate-encoded links throughout the quality info, I will be a happier person that I already am. :)

For the time being I am working like mad to release a drupalized version of the Heart of the Initiate website. The folks over there are wonderful beings and we are working together to get their site brought up the speed with the wonderful world of Web 2.0.

Until I get that site up and running - and it is a big one - I will be putting off the upgrades of the cmanifestations sites.

No worries though! The new sites will be released in a timely fashion, as well as the old ones to be upgraded.

In fact, I am really looking forward to it.

So please do keep checking in as I will be leaving some notes of progress as I move along.

If you have not already done so, you can keep up easily by signing up for my Feedburner RSS/XML Feed.

Today I am announcing the official release of Mandarin Chinese Info, the newest of the new for conscious manifestations websites!

This release comes as awareness of China's growth is well known around the world. China has become a mammoth world player economically, politically and not to mention physically (though it has been that big for a long time!).

As more and more people's awareness is drawn towards China, greater and greater numbers of people are learning Mandarin Chinese.

Additionally, the 2008 Olympic Games are to be held in Beijing, China.

Finally, I am learning Mandarin myself, and this site helps me to learn, as well as people out there.

Best of luck!

In order to quickly and efficiently add many more useful resources to the users of this site, I have added a lot more aggregator link feeds. Basically, these are feeds that provide links to the resources users are interested in by taking search terms from the search engine zniff and pulling them into this site to accompany the many other resources that are here.

This allows users to see the link feed for the terms "learn (language name) free", where "language name" can be any of the ones below (more coming soon).

Note: These links are not personally selected by me, but are available to users for their benefit and are made possible thanks to the wonders of web syndication.

Arabic
Cantonese
English
Esperanto
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Mandarin Chinese
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swahili
Vietnamese

I plan on adding Hebrew, Hindi and others as soon as I can.

Soon I will be implementing a series of resource pages for each language with personally selected links regarding each language. These resources will also contain reviews of the sites that I add in order to best allow users to know what to click and why!

For those of you interested in the search engine optimization side of all of this, it must be noted that this is a great way to add numerous (mostly) quality links to a site quickly and efficiently using the Drupal aggregator module.

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 a while tweaking out the menus on the top of Free Music Software to give people a better way to quickly access to the free music software applications on the site. I categorized them by actions such as Capture, Analyze, Loop, Effect, Master, etc.

When I get another moment, I am going to seriously clean up the category structure which is a little crazy right now. This will be done when the new Drupal 4.7 stable release comes out.

In the next week I will be adding a few more really nice applications, so keep an eye out!