76 replies to this topic

[caston]

Back again guys. I have been busy.

Here is a sneak preview of what I have done so far.

http://www.rejuveped...e=New_mainpage1

[orion602]

Back again guys. I have been busy.

Here is a sneak preview of what I have done so far.

http://www.rejuveped...e=New_mainpage1

cool. i think it looks much better now than before

[caston]

JLL: I would like to thank you for the criticism. It finally got me off my butt and got me to redesign the front page. I have now updated the main page with the new design.

http://www.rejuvepedia.org

I would like to say that from now on instead of responding negatively to criticism I will work the best I can to address the points made in criticism and turn things around. So now that the new front page has gone live I don't want any praises ok. I only want to hear how Rujuvepedia is *still* not a world class website and I welcome intense scrutiny for everything that is not right yet.

orion602: thank you but do not be afraid to point out anything about the website that you believe requires urgent work.

Edited by caston, 13 February 2010 - 05:13 PM.

[Proconsul]

JLL: I would like to thank you for the criticism. It finally got me off my butt and got me to redesign the front page. I have now updated the main page with the new design.

http://www.rejuvepedia.org

I would like to say that from now on instead of responding negatively to criticism I will work the best I can to address the points made in criticism and turn things around. So now that the new front page has gone live I don't want any praises ok. I only want to hear how Rujuvepedia is *still* not a world class website and I welcome intense scrutiny for everything that is not right yet.

orion602: thank you but do not be afraid to point out anything about the website that you believe requires urgent work.

I need some time to explore the site and perhaps give some suggestion. But I want to say that the idea is great and the site looks impressive. So I want to thank you for providing us with a new
useful tool for out battle!

Cheers!

[caston]

Proconsul: C'mon now that kind of praise is just going to make me weak. Rejuvepedia (while showing enormous promise) is still almost useless. To get it up to a world class standard I need some good and harsh criticism.

Edited by caston, 16 February 2010 - 05:12 AM.

[JLL]

Visually it's much more pleasing now than it was. A couple of comments, however:

- There's a lot of text on the front page and it's not clear why the things that are on the front page are there. E.g. "Cancer" is followed by "Earth" -- what do these have in common and why are they important enough to be on the first page?

- The font is very small and the paragraphs are pretty wide. I personally like the "less is more" approach -- more whitespace and less actual text!

- Why does it have to say "systems(human)" instead of just "human"? Is the "systems" part important to the average user? Is this even meant to be used by the average user?

- The pictures are not very good; try flickr.com for some better ones. Also, I would make the pictures the same size to make it more pleasing to the eye.

[caston]

Visually it's much more pleasing now than it was. A couple of comments, however:

- There's a lot of text on the front page and it's not clear why the things that are on the front page are there. E.g. "Cancer" is followed by "Earth" -- what do these have in common and why are they important enough to be on the first page?

I have moved a lot of text from the Rejuvenation Anatomy and Biological Pathogens articles on the front page to their main articles. I have moved cancer to between Biological Pathogens and Symbiosis. Earth seems logical to follow Symbiosis as it's a big world and all species need to be able to live together.

- The font is very small and the paragraphs are pretty wide. I personally like the "less is more" approach -- more whitespace and less actual text!

I have put the font from 11px to 12px by editing one of the CSS files from the skin I am using. That was a gripe of mine as well that I had been meaning to fix. Thank you for motivating me. I have not yet looked at making the paragraphs less wide but I could certainly reduce some of the bloat and fluff in my text.

- Why does it have to say "systems(human)" instead of just "human"? Is the "systems" part important to the average user? Is this even meant to be used by the average user?

Good point. I have fixed this to make it look much cleaner. It is the original and the most important part of the site so yes it is intended to reach a wide audience.

- The pictures are not very good; try flickr.com for some better ones. Also, I would make the pictures the same size to make it more pleasing to the eye.

They are all supposed to be 55px... unless you are talking about the ones in the banner then quite a few of them are different widths but should be more or less the same height (only varying according to my sloppy hand in paint.net)

I do notice the diet image appears to have a much larger height. I'm not sure why that is.

Most of the pics came from Wikipedia as they would be under a free license.

Edited by caston, 16 February 2010 - 01:33 PM.

[caston]

Hello again guys and girls,

I am looking for people to help contribute to Rejuvepedia.

We are looking for articles and information about rejuvenation of relation to a specific area or system about the human body. I don't expect anyone to be immediately productive.
We are looking for people that have an open mind and are keen to learn.

Please see the what needs to be done section on the website:

http://www.rejuveped...eeds_to_be_done

[caston]

No one yet?

I try to make at least 5 edits and 1 blog entry everyday.

I have also started adding sections to adciv.og for open source currency and open source medicine.

Rejuvepedia can collaborate with other wiki's such as adciv.org, medpedia.com anatowiki.wetpaint.com, wikipedia.org and possible even the imminst wiki. Many times I will take content from other wikis (as long as it's creative commons share-a-like attribution) and when possible contribute content back to other wikis. If I can modify my brain to rewire in a way that is both smarter and more generous perhaps we can get some intelligent collaboration here.

I have said before I may add content to the imminst wiki but I was still unclear as to what license the imminst wiki is under. If there are other people reading these with their own wiki projects or wikis that you would like to see collaborate with Rejuvepedia please let me know.

[caston]

If you are looking for a simple but highly effective way to help with Rejuvepedia that only requires a few minutes of your time consider embedding a video:


to embed a youtube video you only need to enter

{{#ev:youtube|xEgp3SEtB0I}} where xEgp3SEtB0I is the code on the youtube url e.g.

You can also embed google video and many videos from many other popular sharing sites. For more information see the embedvideo wiki extension:

http://www.mediawiki...sion:EmbedVideo

An example of Rejuvepedia page with some embedded videos is:

http://www.rejuveped...php?title=Teeth

This would be a good extension to add to the Imminst wiki as well.

I was inspired to add these videos to Rejuvepedia because today I went to get a scale and clean.

Here is the text of my blog entry:

"
User:Caston/BlogEntry: 2010 March 22 14:51:58 UTC

Today I went to the dentist to get a scale and clean. I had not had one since August last year. It was quite a shock because I never realised just how much plaque was on my teeth. I had been flossing but I haven't been using the best technique. In fact the technique I was using helped get rid of food between my teeth but not the build up of plaque. The hygienist got rid of a lot of plaque build up and taught me how to floss correctly.

Now some of my teeth look jagged. I have some tooth mouse plus that I will hopefully be able to remineralise them with.

I have added some videos to the teeth page on Rejuvepedia and posted this on Imminst."

http://www.rejuveped...22_14:51:58_UTC


I would also like to say that it's my birthday on the 24th. The best birthday present would be a contribution to Rejuvepedia because its helping build a resource that the entire world can one day use to help them slow and reverse aging!

Please also leave a birthday message for me on my talk page.

http://www.rejuveped...ser_talk:Caston

I may have a 24 hour period where people can contribute without registering a user account on my birthday. If people can keep watch of it as well to reverse any changes cause by vandals this would be greatly appreciated. That's the only thing that keeps wikipedia from turning into a steaming pile of spam but I will be making another backup of the database just in case so I can revert if need be so its not critical.

Edited by caston, 22 March 2010 - 07:03 PM.

[caston]

Hello everyone and I hope you aren't sick of me posting now but you are dealing with a very persistent bastard.

My birthday is the 24th of March and as of writing this that day is tomorrow. I will be turning 29! I live in Perth, Western Australia which is +800 GMT.

As a special celebration for my birthday I would like to encourage people to contribute to Rejuvepedia and have removed the requirement to create an account and be logged in to edit pages. Now this is only going to be limited for something like 24 hours. On the 25th of March sometime I will most likely turn the feature off. The only exception would be of course if lots of people were making contributions I certainly wouldn't want to interrupt them.

If you would like to leave a birthday message for me please do so on my talk page:

http://www.rejuveped...ser_talk:Caston

If you are unable to contribute content please consider making a small contribution to the webhosting fund.

The paypal button is on my website: http://chris.caston.id.au/

I would still like to encourage people to create an account but the birthday celebration allows everyone to edit pages even if they haven't.

Thank you everyone for all your help so far and over time I will further clarify my vision for Rejuvepedia as a high quality encyclopedia of human rejuvenation developed by people all over the world with rich multimedia content which will completely change the way we look at human health and medicine to a focus on total rejuvenation.

Edited by caston, 23 March 2010 - 01:14 PM.

[caston]

I finally had someone try to spam Rejuvepedia. The talk page for an old blog entry had been spamed with Russian text and hyperlinks. I removed the offending text, wrote a note on the talk page for the IP responsible and changed the permissions so that users must now be logged in to edit the wiki. It is unfortunate that I have had to do this. I have had a few people contribute to the wiki but not as many as I would like.

I have also been in discussions with Eric about the Imminst wiki. I would like to help with this but I must outline a few things.

Firstly Rejuvepedia is like a child to me I'm not giving it away to anyone. I will share content with the imminst wiki but that is because the content is under the creative commons attribute unported 3.0 license. So that is Rejuvepdia is my child and the Imminst wiki is Immint's child. I'm happy for them to play together but I don't want to give away my child.

Secondly for Rejuvepedia and the Imminst wiki to play together they must be under the same license.

e.g. http://creativecommo...nses/by-sa/3.0/


I was also talking to Justin (Mind) in an Imminst meeting before he quit his position as Executive Director. He said he was happy for the Imminst wiki to be under an open license. If this is still the case with and the current leadership is happy with this I like to suggest the Imminst wiki be upgraded to the latest version and the CC SA 3.0 license specified.

I will help with the upgrade where possible most likely the best thing to do is install a new wiki from scratch and test it out and then move all the content over either by updating the database schema for the MySQL database and importing it or copying over all the text from all the pages.

I could either do this as a volunteer or ask to be paid in open currency such as the CES currency for the Rejuvepedia global group.

If you look at : http://www.community...cat=Computer/IT

My entry is the one for Mediawiki support.

If I were to upgrade the Imminst wiki myself I would need access to the server so this would be discussed within leadership. Perhaps I could test the upgrade out on my nearlyfreespeech account first then move everything to new wiki on the imminst webhosting account when ready.

[caston]

JLL:

I have simplified the mainpage a lot by moving sections and trying to group sections together in different categories. There are now only four sections per column and eight all together or nine if you count the introduction at the top.
I was worried that having so many sections on the frontpage was confusing people and making the website less user friendly.

Do you have any other recommendations on how I can improve the wiki?

Edited by caston, 04 April 2010 - 12:21 PM.

[JLL]

I would condense the text on the front page; not by using smaller fonts or cramming more letters into the same space but by making the sentences and paragraphs shorter. As short as possible.

For example:

"Rejuvepedia is an open source project to build an encyclopedia on the subject of rejuvenating the human body on an system-by-system, organ-by-organ, tissue-by-tissue, cell-by-cell, gene-by-gene, protein-by-protein and molecule-by-molecule basis. "

-->

"Rejuvepedia is an open source encyclopedia on rejuvenating the human the body."

I would also get rid of the pics. The smiley looks a bit silly to me, considering that you probably want people to take the site seriously. I would also consider replacing the banner with something more aesthetically pleasing. Like a landscape or whatever.

Maybe the subsections should be combined into larger topics, e.g. community and donations could be subtopics under a larger topic, because they are not directly related to the question of aging.

Finally, it could definitely use more padding and white space. The two paragraphs could also have more space between them.

[caston]

Thank you. Do you think the text should be larger or a better font?

I also just moved a lot of stuff under the headings of community, molecular biology and health. That's why there's now only eight sections instead of the the 14 or so there was before.

The donations I want to keep on the front page. My intention is to make Rejuvepedia a very high traffic site and I won't be able to do this without donations to help cover the bandwidth costs. The donations page is something I am going to have to do a lot more work on to convince people to part with a few dollars from their paypal accounts to help keep the site going.

I am also hoping the intended outcome of following your advice is to make the website big and successful not to wither it away to nothing.

I have also added a link to your inhumanexperiment blog on the resources page:

http://www.rejuveped...Other_resources


Please let me know of any other resources you think should also be on that list.

Edited by caston, 05 April 2010 - 01:17 AM.

[caston]

I want to put Rejuvepedia as a project on KickStarter to raise money for the webhosting costs. The only problem is you need a US address and bank account for these. Could any Imminst members from the US help with this?

http://www.kickstarter.com/

[caston]

Actually don't worry about it I got a reply that it didn't fit with the type of project they were looking for.

[caston]

I am proud to announce the release of Rejuvepedia Round Table. This is a simple discussion page that is easy to access and less deep than the forum.

Will you please help kick start the discussion?

http://www.rejuveped...tle=Round_Table

[caston]

The other thing is I have managed to get myself into about 10 grand AUD debt over the time I have been working on Rejuvepedia. I am only self-employed as a call out computer technician and either I am missing out on all the decent paying work for some reason or the economy is still not doing very well. Probably a bit of both as I generally got most of my income from the lowest end of the market and from aging baby boomers that have been bitten by the collapse of the superannuation retirement fund market.

I have been asking for small donations towards the web hosting fund like $10. There were some donations from before that people generously helped me out when I was saving to go to europe these are the only donations listed on the page. I will rewrite the donations page to make it a bit more professional and change the donation section so the money goes directly into the web hosting fund instead of my own bank account I would like please like people to consider donating towards the webhosting fund. I have removed advertisements. I will even enable micro donations of like 25cents if that helps encourage people to donate.

Even a small amount would make me feel a lot better. I have been miserable about this subject of not enough people helping either with content or with small change contributions towards the web hosting fund.

[JLL]

If you are losing lots of money doing this, perhaps you should reconsider it. Either keep it as a hobby or come up with a way to monetize it (google ads, for example). You can only rely on donations once you're site is popular enough, which is very difficult.

[caston]

JLL:

It's not Rejuvepedia that making me lose money it's my lack of income and regular work from my computer repairs business, my bartercard account which I will probably cancel soon, the stupid girls that I have finally installed a n95 app to block on my phone and the interest on my debts. I doubt I have spent more than $100 so far (probably closer to $50) on hosting costs and domain registration for the website.

I should have been more careful with how I worded that. The decent into debt has happened over the same time I have been working on the website but it is not because of it.

I removed google adwords because they weren't bringing in any income and they were detracting from the website.

It is of course entirely voluntary for people to help I am here for the long run and I will continue to build and fund the website myself even though it is a task that will require the co-operation of many people over the world.

It just somewhat baffles me that every man and his dog isn't 100% behind this with every waking breath. Perhaps I just haven't successfully communicated the vision of what Rejuvepedia really is going to help us achieve.

As I have added a quote:

"Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples."
- Christopher Dawson

I know that for Rejuvepedia to succeed it must be done with the co-operation of all the worlds people.

I will defiantly work on that donation page to make it look more like the donation page for the Wikimedia foundation:

http://wikimediafoun...org/wiki/Donate

and change the setup so that it goes straight to the nearlyfreespeech webhosting account. That way it should be (depending on peoples generosity) self funding so that if I die in some kind of fatal accident then work on the website can continue.

Edited by caston, 08 June 2010 - 01:44 PM.

[caston]

The information is already at:
http://faq.nearlyfre...tions#donations

So at the moment people have three choices for donating:

1) Ask me for my account number and mail in a cheque using the form at
https://www.nearlyfr...t/about/mdonate
2) Donate using the paypal button on the donate page - the money will go through to my personal paypal account which I will then deposit to the webhosting account
3) Wait until I have setup a button on the page to donate directly to the webhosting fund.

BTW I have just deposited $50 USD in to the webhosting account. I want to ensure that there will still be money in the account even if my own financial situation gets worse. I will be asking them to move all the other sites
hosted on my nearly freespeech account to a different account so the funds only get used for Rejuvepedia.

Edited by caston, 08 June 2010 - 02:28 PM.

[caston]

I submitted the secure support request to the nfshost team:

Hello my website Rejuvepedia is starting to get quite serious.

I would like to add a paypal donate button allowing people to donate
to my nfs fund directly. Rejuvepedia 0669-7917322C

I anticipate donations about three times a year ranging from $5 to
$20. This will increase over time as the website becomes more popular
and widely used.

At the moment I also run several other sites under the same account.
It would probably be best to move the other sites to the Aptitude
Technology account so that they don't consume funds donated to the
Rejuvepedia account.

best regards,

Chris Caston

Edited by caston, 08 June 2010 - 02:47 PM.

[caston]

I will be giving serious consideration to turning Rejuvepedia into a non-for profit foundation like the Wikimedia foundation.

[caston]

I have submitted Rejuvepedia as a story on Slashdot. Please vote for it at:

http://slashdot.org/...n81/submissions

[caston]

I also want to add a new section to Rejuvepedia. I have always been fascinated how the aging of the body experienced by astronauts in zero gravity appears to be accelerated aging compared to the aging process that happens much more slowly here on earth. I want to create a section of the wiki that discusses this and how these issues may be addressed. I'm not sure where this section will go. Does anyone have any ideas?

I am considering putting it under the health section:

http://www.rejuveped...hp?title=Health

Edited by caston, 19 August 2010 - 02:06 PM.

[caston]

I have made a very small but quite possibly powerful change to Rejuvepedia. I have put the most recent blog posts at the bottom of the mainpage. Previously the only way to see them was to click on the "recent blog posts" on the left hand side. Now it will hopefully give a greater feeling of active story telling and community to the site.

Please let me know what you think of the changes. I have also fixed some bugs which should allow people to discuss the blog posts and see the posters entire blog. Although all the current blogs posts are from me they can be from any registered user on Rejuvepedia and I would like to invite others to blog there as well.

Please see http://www.rejuvepedia.org

[caston]

I have now integrated Disqus with Rejuvepedia. Disqus allows people to post comments and login using another account such as their twitter, facebook, yahoo, open id or even disqus.

The comment pages come up at end of blog posts and articles. Please help me test out the commenting system and let me know how it is working (or isn't working) for you.

Thank you and merry Christmas to everyone

[caston]

I am looking for more ideas on how I can improve Rejuvepedia.

Thank you

Edited by caston, 08 January 2011 - 05:24 PM.

[revenant]

my friend, going to the home page and finding Jack Lalanne - Face Workout videos? you may want to lose that..