Ok…this is getting fun. I was asked Francis “Frank” Steffan to appear on The Frank Show, on American Voice Radio. This makes the second time in less than a week to be on that network.

This being my second “real” radio interview on big time radio, I felt a lot better and was much happier with how the show went, including topics covered, and some darn good questions.

So, please give it a listen, by clicking the Play button below, or download the mp3 and add it to your Ipod to listen to later.

Comments are most welcome…

Rich

 

 Rich Fleetwood on FEMA, InfraGard, CERT, and Family Prepping: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I had my first live radio interview tonight, and was on the American Voice Radio network for 2 hours this evening. I was interviewed by Michael Lehman, and the topic of the day was family preparedness.

I’ve got the show right here. Just click the player button below and listen to the entire show…

 

 Rich Fleetwood on Civil Defense, Nuclear Preparedness and Fallout Shelter: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Rich

Well, looks like it’s time for an update from yours truly on the CE blog. Lots of news, updates, software projects, business opportunities, and more…a virtual plethora of digital goodness.

Yet another school year has passed here at Central Wyoming College, and we’ve added yet another college graduate to our family, as my son Kenny earned his music degree. As an extra treat, he arranged and sang a duet right before commencement began on the stage of the Robert A. Peck Arts Center here in Riverton. What was really cool was that the entire commencement exercise was broadcast via Wyoming Public Television for the entire town to see on the college’s education access channel.

I’ve got a DVD of the events, and will create a Youtube video of Kenny’s performance for his blog at www.automaticboymusic.com. Kenny’s graduation brings the total number of degrees earned by our family in the last three years here at CWC to SEVEN college degrees. I am very humbled by my entire family working so hard for full and complete educations, and pursuing further college goals in the coming months.

I’ll be starting classes via the University of Wyoming this fall, and will continue working towards my bachelor’s degree over the next couple of years, while working on my home business project. I’ll keep you updated on any news associated with UWyo from this end.

In other family news, we’re going to taking care of our grandchildren for the summer (and possibly longer) so our time for summer fun and travel plans have been put on the back burner for a while.

The SurvivalRing website is undergoing a MASSIVE redesign over the next three months, with EVERY webpage, every documentn, and every download being upgraded to state of the art web design and content management systems. Once all editing is done, changes are tested by a host of SurvivalRing supporters, and hundreds of downloads are added and cataloged into a database tracking system, we’ll flip the switch and let you run with it. Wanna peek at the new design? Check it out at www.survivalring.org/sr to get just a taste of what is coming.

While we’re doing the long awaited update, I’ll also be finishing off some entire new sites that will be part of the *new* SurvivalRing. These new tools include a Product Reviews website for prep and survival gear, a complete EVERYTHING FALLOUT SHELTER site with all the documents I have put all in ONE place for ease of use (and using the www.myfalloutshelter.com domain), and some over yet to be released projects still in the planning stages.

Once nearly all projects are up to speed, the new homepage for SurvivalRing will be a portal into all areas of the entire SurvivalRing network, that loads fast, gives a short bio of each site section, and let’s you just jump right into the area you are most interested in, without having to jump through any hoops.

As SurvivalRing moves forward, and the major updates are done, we’ll be creating a series of podcasts, videos, and new ebooks (and possibly even hardcopy versions) on all areas of preparedness.

Our Podcasts, to be called SurvivalRing Radio, will start broadcasting in July, and will include news, alerts, threat analysis, prepping tips, interviews, reviews, and a whole lot more. I’ll be producing weekly 30 minute shows at first, but the long term goal, after things are all said and done (all major projects for the site are finished), is to have a daily one hour show, which if things work out, may go on broadcast radio through any of a number of web/on air broadcast organizations.

Our Video Projects, to be called SurvivalRingTV, will start appearing after the first of the year, and will feature hands on tips, outdoors adventure, survival how-to’s, preparedness tools and uses, and eventually a complete series on fallout shelter building, designs, systems, and use.

As all these creative outlets are being worked on, I’ll be building up the business side of SurvivalRing as well, to support upgrades to dedicated hosting of the entire SurvivalRing network, HD video cameras and tools, audio mixing systems and needs for live radio broadcasts from my home studio, and a variety of other tools to create unlimited potential for online education for all website visitors. The business at SurvivalRing consists of CD ROM publications, online digital media content, membership sections, our new forums system, advertising opportunties, home business creation packages for anyone needing extra income.

Finally, to round everything out, our long overdue SurvivalRing Newsletter will begin production again in June. Expect weekly updates, free download links, news, tools, and commentary on the world of survival and preparedness, from someone who’s spent a lifetime living it. Yep…me.

More to come later. Stay tuned. This is The Summer of SurvivalRing.

Rich

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

SurvivalRing has been on the web since 1997. It started out as a single web page to support the SurvivalRing Survival and Preparedness webring, hosted way back then on Webring.org (now a poorly run Dot.Com company). Within a couple of months, the webring had 12 members webrings. By the late fall of 1999 (pre Y2K), SurvivalRing had 750 members and amazing traffic.

Starting in early 1998, SurvivalRing become it’s own website, with hosting, downloads, features, and a budding online community was born.

Today, SurvivalRing has been beefed up on infrastructure and backend support, and now has the room, and power, to offer AMAZING future growth.

Here’s the details…

Current online storage capacity….
25 gigabytes (or 25,0000 megabytes)
(originally? 10 megabytes)

Current bandwith limits…
None - Now with Freedom bandwith
(originally? 500 megabytes a month)

Current UNIQUE domain capability…
8 unique, full blown domain baseds websites
(originally? 1…and multiple subdomains)

added…
SSL certificate and security features
unlimited email addresses
unlimited subdomains
much, much more…

Now, what can I do with all that space?

=> Put dozens of CDs worth of new content on the web.

=> Put ISO CD image files on the web for folks to instantly download, if they prefer that do receiving a regular CD in the mail, for both of my CD publications to date

=> Put HUNDREDS of new files online that I’ve been holding off on to keep the site running smoothly without hitting bandwidth or space limitations. The new documents will contain tens of thousands of new pages, never before on the web.

=> Add video productions as I make them, and keep all variations of video files (mpeg, mov, rm, avi, etc) online for visitor choices of download

=> upcoming podcast production…ALL shows will remain online instead of being rotated offline.

Who knows what else I’ll add? But, the good news is, I literally have power and space to put incredible amounts of data, info, and knowledge online, all in one place.

Now, I’ve gone through as many parts of the website since the move was completed today, and think I’ve fixed all the database errors that popped up. If, however, you find any part of the website now working, please email me and let me know so I can fix it asap.

Now, go and enjoy the rest of the website. And, thanks for dropping in…

Rich
Founder-SurvivalRing.org

Time for another news update from Wyoming .

In the last 6 weeks or so, SurvivalRing has had a major set of attacks from many different sources. Due to some open source file security holes, we had a few “Script Kiddies” break into the site, and cause both some disfigured home pages (twice), major spam attack (twice), and some political hacking from a group of Islamo-Facists, who posted anti-Israeli war pictures of war victims, including mangled children…it was horribly nasty… Mine was NOT the only site. I know of hundreds of other sites which were using the same open source tools, that were hacked in the same way…it was an automated and combined attack…but needless to say, we were a victim.

All scripts have been updated, but our chat room is still down…to be finished this weekend soon. The chat hack seriously affected thousands of sites, and for a few weeks, a huge rush of these same script kiddies kept trying to get in, after I had removed the weak link in the chat code.

I’ve even seen a video made by the hackers, showing EXACTLY how to break into and destroy sites…it was amazingly simply, once the hole was found. Be certain…I AM watching the site admin section VERY closely, and have installed extended tools to track hack attempts and IP addresses.

I’ve also had to fix a few other sites I admin, who received the same automated attacks. So, I’ve been a bit busy. My apologies for a lack of updates here on the blog.

Stay tuned…major updates coming to the SurvivalRing website.

Rich

I’m finishing up an Associates of Applied Science degree in Web Design in a few weeks, and I’m working on my “big project” for this semester…conversion of SurvivalRing.org to a database driven website, from static html pages. It’s going to be a biggie, but I’m at the point of total understanding of how and what to do.

Very happy to be at this point, too. This is the reason I came back to college as a non-traditional student…to learn the skills to enhance a project that has taken over my life, and make it the cutting edge resource that I know it can be.

At the same time I’ve been working on this degree, and the A.A.S in Electronic Media that I earned last year, I’ve also been playing with a lot of other web technology.

Using Dreamweaver and Flash, I’ve done some pretty cool things, and I’m very comfortable with what these tools can do. I’ve come to enjoy a handful of tools that make web development much faster and easier. For example, I have a full blown web server running on my laptop right now, using Wampserver. This package is free, includes mysql, php, apache, and phpmyadmin. Perl, Zend Optimizer, and Webalizer are also available as downloads for this wonderful tool. I’m using this system to work on many projects right now, before taking them to my online hosting account. Development time has been greatly increased.

I’ve also been hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails, and found a similar package for creating an environment on the laptop for learning Ruby. It’s called Instant Rails, and creates a running server environment for Ruby. I haven’t done anything with Ruby yet, but it looks like an immensely likable package. Once I’ve played with it a bit, I’ll share some fun stuff I do with it.

I’m sure I’ve stated it before, but I’ll say it again. I’m not getting these degrees and skills to just be hireable by other companies. I’m putting enormous amounts of time into creating cutting edge web tools, infrastructure, and state of the art programming, to enable much easier, greatly enhanced, and much faster serving of the same science and fact based survival and preparedness information I’ve been doing for almost ten years now.

Sure, I’ll love a good paying, benefit enhanced, and long term job to make my life easier, supporting my wife and I, in some comfort and ease (compared to the path we’ve had for the past 20 years of hard work due to no college degrees).

The Entreprenuerial bug has bitten, and I’ve got a business plan, along with marketing and publicity plans, to make my little SurvivalRing website THE survival and preparedness site for the ages…or at least enough to help folks worldwide, while making a real living from it. Time will tell…but I know enough now that I can make it happen.

Time to head back to the editing screen to do some more code hacking…Enjoy the sites!