Sanskrit & Trika Shaivism (English-Home)

जावास्क्रिप्ट अक्षम है! इस लिंक की जाँच करें!

Redesigning the site

Detailed log of the changes

The website has been fully renovated and moved to HTML5!!!

  1. Hey, what happened to the website! Surprise! Yes, it has been finally renovated in its entirety!
  2. This has been mostly (99%) the work of Zoltán --his profile is right at the bottom of the page the link bearing his name leads to-- (with a very beautiful exclusive design by Albert Bochnert), our most recent collaborator from Hungary ("Magyarország", in Hungarian language). The entire renovation of the website has taken about five months of hard work! Congratulations Zoltán on your immense effort!
  3. What is new then? Everything except the content:
  1. The website is now fully "dynamic" (by using solid PHP and MySQL) in opposition to its old version which was mostly "static".
  2. The first consequence of such a drastic change is that now I will be able to devote much more time to my main activity: "Sanskrit and its universe" instead of to "dealing with codes and more codes, manually for the most part".
  3. The second consequence of this massive change will be that the website will become more useful to the visitors in many ways, e.g. they will be able to comment under certain pages I will select later (not under all of them because with more than 300 documents per language, I would be replying comments for the rest of my life, haha). To comment, the visitor will have to "Register", of course. The process is very simple to understand indeed.
  4. The content of the website is based on solid HTML5, the latest markup language. HTML5 is so new that if it is used in a "raw" way, it will not work on certain old browsers. Anyway, it will work on this website even if the visitor uses an old browser thanks to certain methods implemented by Zoltán to emulate old versions of HTML. The experience is totally transparent to the visitor. Yes, it is always better to have the latest version of any browser but even though you do not have it yet, our website will continue working for you as always.
  5. It is easier to change the design of the whole website when it is dynamic, specially if the website is big like ours.
  6. Extreme SEO (search engine optimization).
  7. As a Sanskrit scholar, you will never see bad transliterations on this website (e.g. "Paramarthasara", the "wrongly written" name of the scripture I have been recently translating) but rather good transliteration: "Paramārthasāra". This is inevitable in my case. Nonetheless, the drawback in my perfectionism is that most people will search "as non-scholars", e.g. "Paramarthasara" or even "Paramartha sara" in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc. In this way, they will be very likely not to discover my newest translation even in their best dreams, hehe. But that is gone now with the "Wrongly written words vs. Rightly written words" list implemented by Zoltán. Through that workaround, people searching "Paramarthasara", for example, will find the website sooner or later. The current number of words on that list is immense now, and it will increase as I add more and more terms in the future. Yes, this will bring more visitors to the website indeed! Of course, this process will be a gradual one. Not that this website will be in page 1 of all the search engines overnight, but the odds of finding the website will undoubtedly increase colossally over the time. This solution puts and end to the eternal complaint: "I search Shiva on Google and never find your website!" as well as to my eternal answer: "This is so because I write that word correctly in IAST transliteration: Śiva". Yes, with words that are so common as "Shiva" (search it on Google and see the quantity of results), the website will not be in page 1 of the search engine in a few days, months or even years, but there are many other Sanskrit terms to be considered too. All in all, this solution by Zoltán is quite a blessing!
  8. Complete support for mobile devices of all type.
  9. There are more consequences coming from the renovation:
  1. A comfortable accordion menu on the right, which fits better than the previous dropdown menu in the screen of little mobile devices. This menu is fully functional even if Javascript is disabled on the browser of the visitor, as it will appear completely expanded to him in that case. Besides, a warning will come up containing a link to a page with the solution, i.e. the way to "enable Javascript in the major browsers".
  2. Easier access to the version of a page in the other languages.
  3. Support for RSS feeds as before but now more stylish.
  4. The translators that collaborate with me will be able to translate the pages much more easily, without so much interaction with me. Now, they will interact with the website itself and consequently the translations will be created faster. This will also give me more time for publishing fresh content.
  5. Presence of a "breadcrumbs-based navigation" on top of all the pages. Now the visitor will know exactly "where he is at every moment". And by clicking on the components of the breadcrumbs trail, he will access to a list of pages present in that section. For example, if you go to "Alphabet (English)" and watch the breadcrumbs on top of that page: "English-Home > Essentials > Alphabet > Alphabet (English)", you can click on, e.g. "Essentials", and get a list of all the documents under that section. This makes navigation a piece of cake, lol! Yes, it is immensely helpful to the visitor, no doubt about it.
  6. And much more!
  1. If you notice that the website is "kind of broken" somewhere or that it contains some typos, let me know, please. As the change is so colossal, it is very probable that something might have got broken in the process despite our many tests over the last five months.
  2. All this work is offered at the feet of Lord Śiva!
  3. Enjoy!

Gabriel Pradīpaka
November 12th, 2012

The site is now completely moved to XHTML 1.0 Strict!!!

The same advantages of XHTML 1.0 Transitional and even more! Your browser will be happier, no doubt about it. Enjoy!

Gabriel Pradīpaka
January 29th, 2008

The site is now completely redesigned and moved to XHTML 1.0 Transitional!!!

The newest standard is XHTML (eXtended HTML) and the entire world is moving to that slowly. And this website is not the exception to the rule. People are using new devices to access the Web (not only PC's), which demand source code in XHTML. Why? Because XHTML guarantees that the source code contains no errors or deprecated/obsolete codes.

To prevent this website from becoming obsolete too, I had to undertake the task of updating the code very gradually as well as the aesthetic aspect. Because of the huge size of this site (about 600 documents at present), the amount of hours needed to complete the task was insane. Anyway, it was well worth the effort, no doubt about it. Enjoy!

Gabriel Pradīpaka
May 18th, 2005