After being offline for a few months, I have finally been able to replace our dead forum board, with a brand new state of the art forum system called the Invision Power Board.

We HAD been using IkonBoard 3.1.1, which suffered massive unfixable security issues, and upon trying to update many different ways to the latest version of 3.1.5, it promptly committed suicide. Hundreds of spams a day were being injected, and the Ikonforum team in the years since I had originally installed the software no longer existed or cared for full path upgrades. This was very disconcerting, and painful to loose so many useful posts.

I was able to save the data in a database, but attempts to salvage them coherently into the new software haven’t been fully successfull…yet.

But… the NEW board is COMPLETELY operational. I’ve already got two new moderators, and more to come.

Jump on over to the SRCC (SurvivalRing Community Center) and register a username and start posting away.

The more the merrier…

Rich
Founder - SurvivalRing

Watch this video by Penn and Teller. It’s an irreverent, satirical, yet biting commentary on the whole issue of gun control, 2nd ammendment rights, and firearms in general.

CAUTION: The name of the show is “Bullsh*t”, and there is blue language…however, I think this show is worth watching for the broad overview these two bring to the subject.

I’ve done quite a few new website projects for the SurvivalRing web project over the past couple of months. As a college student with two applied science degrees, and goals of helping others in every way possible, I’m using my web, media, programming, production, and business skills to create resources to help everyone become more self sufficient and self reliant. This includes giving you the tools to generate you own income, regardless of your limits.

With that in mind, I’m creating a series of profit producing websites that will cover all the operations costs of the SurvivalRing website (now in it’s TENTH year!), provide an income that allows me to take care of my family’s needs, and let me continue to expand the boundaries of SurvivalRing’s reach and capabilities.

First and favorite at this point is my new SurvivalGear store, where you can pick up a multitude of survival tools, survival kits, survival food, and much more. Need to stock up on some potassium iodide? We have it… How about some Israeli Gas masks AND extra filters for everyone in your family? We’ve got that too. Maybe you might want a prepackaged Bug Out Bag…for the next tornado or hurricane that heads you way? We have them here, here and here…

There are literally thousands of survival and preparedness items in the
SurvivalGear store, including entertainment items such as classic survival related movies (The Stand, Red Dawn, The Road Warrior, Braveheart, and more), tools including multitools, rescue tool kits, emergency safety hammers, generators, and other neccessary items.

How about communications equipment? You’ll need a shortwave radio, handheld family walkie talkies, a CB radio for the car AND truck, emergency alert weather radio for the home, office, and vehicle, and for the really bad days…you’ll want hand crank powered radios to get news when there is no electricity or batteries in your home. You might even grab a police scanner to get a heads up on local events as they happen.

For around the home, you’ll want to consider MAJOR power needs such as a whole house generator, escape ladders, security systems, and food storage .

There is SO much more in the SurvivalRing SurvivalGear store. Drop on by and see how vast our selection is, and the quality of the products. Brand names you can trust, and fulfillment by none other the Amazon.com. All proceeds from our store sales go DIRECTLY back to this website to continue the work we’ve been doing for almost ten years.

If you find there is an area lacking in the store, or you need a specific item…tell me. I’ll add it to the store system so that others may find it much easier. You’ll find food for long term storage, tools for every emergency situation, electronic gear for every kind of communications, books on every aspect of survival and preparedness, entertainment resources that will make you think, give you ideas, build your skills, and more (think videos, movies, software, games, and the like), and a lot more. Drop on by and check out the tens of thousands of items you can find there in a moments notice.

Next, is my SurvivalRing Download Store, with dozens of digital ebooks, software, manuals, and my most popular civil defense survival documents. Visit and see the large collection of tools I have there, including quite a few packages that will give YOU the ability to create your own home based, income producing business. I have thousands more books, packages, templates, turnkey websites, and more to be added over the coming months. ALL of them will have resell rights, meaning YOU can buy them and turn around and sell them yourself on your OWN website. The Download Store is automated (think about that…making money in your sleep), and once you make a purchase, you create a simple and quick user account, go to Paypal to make the payment, and after payment return back to the store for INSTANT DOWNLOAD 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Interesting in learning how to do this? I can show you how…

My CD Rom publications also have their own website now, at SurvivalRing Media Store. Currently the store only has these CDs as the only products, but the store uses the same programming as the Download store. The only difference is that the Media Store sells TANGIBLE products, and will include many items besides CDs, including my upcoming video productions, my rare book collection extras, and new and used items you might find handy and interesting. If you don’t have Paypal or a credit card, you can send money orders or checks as your payment, as the website can produce an invoice to include with your payment.

Much more in the works, including an entirely new section for my web based business. I’m going to be creating a VIRTUAL HOME INCOME system that anyone can use to supplement their income, or create a brand new career. Features of this system will include packages business software, downloadable products, affiliate sale, joint ventures, and tons of freebies. Watch this space for the latest info.

That’s it for now. Have a great weekend!

Rich

Being one of those kind of people who tries to ready for any little thing, I usually have on my belt a Gerber multitool (which I use at least a dozen times a day), and a MiniMag double A flashlight in its own little holster. This is great for college, when you’re digging under desks trying to fix other people’s computers, traipsing across campus after dark after closing the lab, or fixing the car in the parking lot at Walmart after the rear bearing goes out on the ALTERNATOR, of all things.

Well, the cool tool above is an UPGRADE kit to any AA minimag flashlight, that allows you to LED based light, with a greatly increased lifespan of your batteries.

Takes only minutes to change out a couple of parts, with NO tools needed, and the light seems to be ever so much brighter, at least what I’ve seen under the desks I’ve worked on lately. Give it a try!

Aa Mini Maglite LED Conversion Kit, You Save $3.02 - Use keycode SPRINGFLING at checkout, Expires 05/10/2006

Interesting email day today…

Seems “urban survival” is coming back in vogue in a big way again…

First email was from John C. P. Goheen of Terranova Pictures, from the western suburbs of the big city of Denver, Colorado. He’s a television journalist who’s looking for assistance on a couple of stories….one area regarding “bomb shelters”, and the other on urban survival techniques. Here’s his email…

Hello Richard,

I am a television journalist researching a couple of stories…one on urban survival techniques and one on underground shelters (some would call bomb shelters) .

I came across your site and found it very interesting. I am interested in identifying several things. Related to the underground shelters story, I am interested in finding manufactures of this product. I would also like to locate and find someone who has a vintage 1950s era shelter that would allow me to video tape.

I am trying to find examples of things people are doing to be better prepared for the unexpected, either man made or natural. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks, John
John C. P. Goheen
Terranova Pictures

My reply to him follows…

Hi John,

Thanks for the kind words about the site. There are several companies across the US manufacturing prefab fallout shelters, including delivery and installation.

Walton McCarthy at www.bombshelters.com has been featured in many documentaries and news stories before and after 9/11. His former website was www.radius-defense.com .

A friend of mine runs www.safecastle.com , and offers three types of prefab steel shelter here…

You can read more about JC at his blog.

Author Robert Crais is a true Robert A. Heinlein fan. Read about his visit to Heinlein’s bomb shelter in Colorado Springs. Includes photographs.

http://www.illumirate.com/opinions.cfm?cat_id=425565&item_id=93250

His web page was recently updated, and I can’t find a current link to his original article. The current owner of Heinlein’s old home might be able to help you get some video footage. Not sure of the address in Colorado Springs, but someone in that town might be able to direct you there.

Regarding examples of prepping….well, I eat, live, breathe, and share the prep lifestyle for a living. Just earned a electronic media degree, finishing a web degree in May, and started an emergency and disaster management degree this summer, but I’ve live the lifestyle all my life.

I have contacts all over the nation that do the same, and most have the same goals and ideals I do. Many of my closest friends are also active and retired public safety, military, law enforcement and emergency management folks, who have dealt in some way, shape or form with disasters big and small…and helping communities respond and recover.

My background (available on my website) includes years in federal employment, defense electronics, and manufacturing, as well as a love of the outdoors, nature, and the physical world around us.

In being ready for nature and man made disaster, you have to know what the threats around you are. Studying history and events that occur locally and regionally help prepare folks for hurricane zones, tornadic activity, earthquake zones, and the like. My goal is helping others recognize these historical threats, and make plans on dealing specifically with them.

With the events of Katrina, our nation saw the decades of planning went for nought; billions of dollars of government funds to the states went to waste, fraud, and graft; hundreds of man-years of disaster education were useless; and untold numbers of real American lives were put at risk…by a nation that SHOULD have been able to respond INSTANTLY to a natural disaster that took DAYS to actually hit the New Orleans area.

What does this mean? In a true national catastrophe, it falls to the individual to develop skills to save themselves, their family, and friends in a true disaster. What is needed is a much larger program that starts at bottom up, such as the FEMA CERT program, instead of talking heads and management wonks from DC (such as Micheal Brown) who have NO background whatsoever in emergency planning, who are doing the thinking and making decisions, without truly knowing what is about to happen to real people.

My goal is to actually develop training plans, videos, and radio broadcasts that do exactly this. I’m already creating video productions aimed at young adults, and have produced a Telly Award winning set of PSAs, which you can see at www.yaaaonline.com . This is just the start. Many more folks like myself are working on this area of work, and we will be successful.

I’ll be glad to share your request for info on my email lists, and several forums. Or, if you’d like to talk to me further, my contact info is below.

Good luck in your quest, and hope I’ve been able to help some.

Rich

Got something you’d like to share with John? Email me, or hit the CONTACT form at the top of the page to send me a message.

The other email was from Howard D. Shapiro…a big time L.A. lawyer who is seeking a little assistance in regard to Les Stroud, star of the cable television show Survivorman. I’ll share more later…let’s just say Les is coming to the states to visit for now…

Source from eWEEK

WordPress 1.5.2 Is Good Fit for Business
By Jim Rapoza
September 19, 2005

BOTTOM LINE:
CONTENT AUTHORING
ROLES AND WORKFLOW
DEVELOPER OPTIONS
PLATFORM SUPPORT

WordPress is free to use and licensed under the standard GNU GPL. The WordPress site has plenty of good documentation and support forums, but there is no information provided about possible commercial-level support.

Bring up the term “corporate blogging” in a group of technology workers, and there’s bound to be a few snickers as images are conjured of lame and infrequent executive-level blogs or marketing campaigns disguised as blogs.

But blogging can be used in ways that serve traditional business needs. In fact, the best blogging applications can handle many of the tasks performed with portal, content management, and collaboration and discussion systems.

Blogging has its roots in open-source software, and one of the most widely used platforms for blogging is WordPress (www.wordpress.org). In eWEEK Labs’ tests of the most recent release, 1.5.2, we were impressed with WordPress’ good administrative capabilities, extensive customization options and easy-to-use end-user posting interfaces.

WordPress lets administrators control who can view, respond to and create content, and it now includes options for building standard Web pages within the WordPress environment. All these features make the platform suitable for internal company portals.

WordPress is based on the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database. WordPress, which is free and licensed under the GNU GPL (General Public License), is simple to install on Linux, Unix and Windows platforms.

The WordPress site boasts that installation of the application takes only 5 minutes, but we think that applies to those installing it on a hosted server. Still, it was easy to get up and running on our SuSE Linux-based test server.

WordPress’ management is very good—we found that pretty much anything can be done from this interface, even basic layout customizations. The initial management screen, almost portallike in its design, is a useful dashboard that shows a list of recent posts and comments, as well as anything requiring the user’s immediate attention.

As a high-level administrator, we could define basic settings for the site, such as name and address structure and whether files (and what type of files) could be uploaded by users. A wide variety of options let us control who could respond to posts and what level of moderation was required. We could also set up a list of blacklisted terms to avoid comment spam.

WordPress supports trackback and pingback, both of which make it possible for blogs to notify one another when linked. Trackback and pingback are standard blog features, but they have some useful applications in a corporate setting—for example, allowing users to know what their colleagues are doing and when their work is being used in another project.

One somewhat-confusing aspect of WordPress is how users and blog authors are managed. Rather than using assignable rights and roles as a portal would, users in WordPress are ranked from Level 0 (almost no rights) to Level 10 (full administrative rights). By default, WordPress has only one Level 10 user.

Levels are well-documented online, and we were able to use them with ease after a little experimentation. Still, the level system seems to have been designed with standard blogs in mind, where users gain the trust of the blog owner over time. In a corporate setting, a more well-defined rights assignment system would work better.

All users access the same management interface as the administrator, although menu options are limited as the user’s level decreases. To post to the blog, a user chooses the Write option, which presents a simple but effective form-based interface for writing a post. Content in the posts is in HTML, but well-implemented buttons will automatically generate code for such commonly used items as links, images and rich-text formatting.

Lots of options are available from this main interface, including choosing categories and whether to allow comments to the post. We especially liked WordPress’ ability to support private and password-enabled posts, both of which can be attractive in corporate environments.

While WordPress includes an Upload option, useful for uploading images to use in a post, it doesn’t have a facility for managing images that have already been uploaded. However, multiple WordPress plug-ins can be found online that provide this capability.

It is also possible to configure WordPress to accept posts sent to a specific e-mail address. While we would be hesitant to use this in a public system, it could prove useful in corporate settings where some users resist learning even a simple Web-based interface.

The look and layout of the site in WordPress is based on themes—essentially collections of style sheets and PHP template files. It was easy during tests to create our own themes or to customize the many themes available online. In addition, while any serious editing should be done from a dedicated authoring application, we liked that we could edit themes directly from the Web-based management interface.

All template and theme changes in WordPress happen automatically, meaning we didn’t have to restart anything to enable them. We also could have as many themes as we wanted, and we could move the entire site among them with a single mouse click.

In addition to the image plug-ins mentioned above, numerous WordPress plug-ins are available online that provide additional management and configuration options, as well as advertising management capabilities and features that fight comment spam.

Can comment spam be stopped? Click here to read more.

Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.

Evaluation Shortlist
Hosted blogging platforms A wide variety of ISPs and major Internet companies offer some form of hosted blogging, often for free or included with another service. The best known of the hosted services is Google’s venerable Blogger (www.blogger.com)

PHP-Nuke and Plone Two of the best-known open-source portal platforms, PHPNuke.org’s PHP-Nuke and the Plone Foundation’s Plone both provide blogging capabilities as well as robust collaboration and content management features (phpnuke.org, plone.org)

SixApart Ltd.’s Movable Type One of the longest-standing blogging platforms, Movable Type is now a commercial product and is available in both installed and hosted options (www.sixapart.com)

Labs Director Jim Rapoza can be reached at jim_rapoza@ziffdavis.com.