Archive
Below you can find a list of items that were published on the home page in the past.
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April 2022 update: since posting the message below, Durban has experienced serious riots and looting, damaging infrastructre and supply lines, in July 2021. These were followed by floods in November 2021, and catastrophic floods in April 2022. The infrastructure is severely damaged, with roads, water pipes, and electricity susbstations and lines washed away. Close to 500 people died. More than 40 000 people are homeless. We are expected to be on water and electricity rationing for up to a year. In both November 2021 and April 2022, my office, located on the first floor, got flooded again, but by now I know the drill and evacuate all equipment out of there as soon as the first water starts coming in. The building, however, has suffered water damage. All of this forces me to shift my priorities, meaning the further development of the Exopaedia is on the backburnere again for now.
June 2022 update: on 20 and 21 May 2022, we again had catastrophic floods. More roads and bridges are washed away. We were without electricity for six days and without water for 11 days. They have now been restored, but with frequent (read virtually daily) interruptions. There is only one secondary road, with a stretch where there is only 1 lane available, that connects us to the outside world.
Development on the Exopaedia was suspended from Novermber 2019 until January 2021: in November 2019, we were hit by extreme weather, including 65 cm of rain in one day. The office got flooded, and my equipment, with the exception of the laptop, did not survive. The humidity caused short-circuits in the power supplies, blowing up the computers. I've got full backups etc., but will have to replace all the equipment, which comes at a considerable cost.
As of 12 February 2020, I had one computer back up and running, which then died three times in the next year. It seems to be working fine, for now. I still don't have a dedicated development (database & website) server. I have, in the meantime, installed a copy of the database server and website server on the one computer I have. This is a workaround, but at least it means that as of January 2021, I can work on the Exopaedia again, albeit considerably slower.
12/02/2020: This is more of a symbolic update than anything else. It turned out the move to the new datacenter had created several glitches: files hadn't been copied across which led to certain pages not working; the default code page on the new database server is different from the old one which meant special symbols like letters with accents were not showing correctly, etc. Those glitches have been fixed now. It took this long because of what's mentioned higher up: a storm blew up my equipment.
23/09/2019: a lot has happened since the previous update. The Exopaedia has moved to a new data center. We now have https access. About one third of the pages had code updates to take better advantage of semantic markup. But it's also been a budy year that left me with less time for actual content updates. Unfortunately, I do not see that improving any time soon.
26/07/2018: The Exopaedia is about to turn 10 years old. I had planned a new, more secure engine for that occasion, as well as a separate version that is further optimized for mobile devices. After having spent many, many hours on both, both projects had to be shelved. The new engine is far more secure, but the loading time per page quadrupled, so that wasn't an option. The AMP version requires https for images, etc., and that, too, became an obstacle that's not worth it.
28/04/2018: I updated the statistics. The top 10 of most read pages remains fairly steady, but, surprisingly, in the last year the numbers 10 to 20 have changed drastically. Half of the search terms entered in search engines to find the Exopaedia have also changed over the last year.
16/04/2018: Since 18 Feb. 2018 hardly anything has been added or updated because I experienced constant Internet interruptions, which, combined, ended up lasting for over 6 weeks.
29/10/2017 - The Halloween Update: after rereading John Mack's work, I have decided to integrate all the 'symbols' from the Hyperbase into the Exopaedia, because, during encounters, often symbolic language and imagery is used. As a result, the amount of topics in the Exopaedia has grown by 50%.
28/04/2017: By now, all but two topics have been updated. Today, the website was also moved to a new server which supports newer (and faster) technologies.
23/10/2016: I've updated the statistics, updated some topics as well as some URLS, and removed about a dozen dead URLs.
10/10/2016: updating all topics is taking longer than anticipated. More than 80% of the topics have by now been processed. I also discovered that about one quarter of the external links on the site were no longer correct. Those, too, are now being updated or removed (if the site is no longer available).
06/08/2016: In order to 1) score better in search engines, and 2) make links to the site look better in social media, ALL topics will be given short descriptions. Updates will happen on an ongoing basis (at least two per week). This should be finished by the end of the month, and means that all topics will be updated this month.
03/08/2016: Dozens of topics were updated and few new ones added as well. There are quite a number of invisible changes as well, to make the site better compatible with social media.
06/06/2016: Some improvements were made to make the interface more mobile-friendly (vertical spacing between links was increased, e.g.). The alphabetical index now allows to view only people, or locations, or projects, etc. Over the last few months several topics have also been added and updated.
26/02/2016: Between 14 and 18 February 2016, the Exopaedia was knocked offline on several occasions because of DDOS attacks.
29/01/2015: I added an extra 'special page' that allows to link phenotypes and civilizations / locations.
12/12/2014: I added the information on Sumerian, Greek and Norse mythology that the Hyperbase had.
07/08/2014: shortly after the April update my workstation died. A new one had to be configured, which, again, resulted in delays in updating the exopaedia. Several new items have been added and updated. I've been maintaining this project by myself for the last 8 years, and will now take a break. There will in all likelihood not be any updates in the next months.
02/04/2014: another small update was done today, with 5 new topics and 7 updated topics.
01/03/2014: In between mid-November and today, no updates have taken place because first the development server needed fixing, and shortly afterwards died. The new server is configured, and up and running. I just did a minor update (of 12 topics) as a test, and everything works again the way it should.
15/10/2013: Over the last week a number of further server and page tweaks resulted in a speed increase of approx. 300% (!). Pages are also more 'accessible' now. Last but not least, you can follow us on Twitter: @exopaedia.
20/09/2013: About 40 topics were added or updated in the last 4 months. There also were some further tweaks to JavaScript and CSS to increase page speed.
02/05/2013: About 20 topics were added or updated. The CSS for the site has also been tweaked further for smart phones with lower resolutions. One in 3 of our visitors in the last month used a mobile device.
01/03/2013: Some days ago, approximately 30 topics were added or updated. There also have been some minor tweaks and bug fixes to the site.
17/01/2013: several new topics have been added and modified (civilizations and contactees). Some of these new topics have been written by new contributors, which hopefully will result in more updates in the future.
20/11/2012: 5 topics have been updated since the previous update. A problem with conflicting character sets - which resulted in some characters not being shown correctly - has also been resolved.
15/08/2012: a new version of the exopaedia was launched. The site has been redone as an HTML5 web site, with 'responsive web design,' and in line with the principles of 'progressive enhancement'. The site is now officially no longer in Beta. Some further fine-tuning is still to be expected. In the last two weeks 46 topics have also been updated.
01/08/2012: The exopaedia celebrates its 4th birthday today, and was updated for the occasion. A number of new civilizations have again been added (all based on contactee cases) while plenty of other topics have been updated. I'm planning to do several minor additions in the next weeks.
12/05/2012: since the latest news item below, the database has been updated five times. A number of new civilizations have been added, while others have been updated.
28/06/2011: a number of topics have again been updated, including the exophenotypes. Expect more additions and updates in the near future.
18/03/2011: 20 topics have been updated. Some images were integrated in a number of items as well.
01/11/2010: The Google Webmaster Tools provided me with a list of topics where inline references still referred to the 'old' names of the topics that had to be renamed for the 'clean URLs' to work. Those have all been corrected now.
17/10/2010: Version 0.9.1 finally gives us clean URLs! From now onward, we no longer use URLs like www.exopaedia.org/display.php?by=topic&val=Exopolitics, but www.exopaedia.org/Exopolitics instead, which is cleaner and simpler. The flip side of this is that some topics had to be renamed because URLs can't contain certain characters, like '/' or '*' and even the '.' for initials causes a problem. This means that some bugs may still exist and that some topics may not be available. Should you encounter such a case, please use the FEEDBACK feature to let me know so I can remedy the situation. - IF YOU HAVE LINKS TO SPECIFIC TOPICS, PLEASE ADJUST THEM!
31/08/2010: in the last 3 months over one quarter of the topics have been updated.
14/08/2010: quite a number of topics have been updated in the last two months.
17/07/2010: Version 0.9.0 has been released. This version works with a lexicon that keeps track of synonyms, alternate spelling, etc. It also has the objecttypes for each topic, etc.
20/04/2010: It has been rather quiet on the Exopaedia, which was mainly due to a prolonged illness. All of that is about to change in the next months as we're working on the release of Exopaedia 1.0. For more information, check out the ROAD MAP.
07/01/2009: While the interface of the Exopaedia hasn't changed (and therefore still is beta 0.3), the content of quite a number of topics has been updated steadily over the last months.
27/09/2008: The wiki version of the exopaedia has been locked, since information kept on being replaced by spammers. It will no longer be maintained.
07/09/2008: I've switched to a different database table format, which is better for full text searches. Full Text Search is now available under 'Advanced Search'.
The Exopaedia was hacked on August, 21, 22 and 23. None of the information in the database was affected, but thousands of online ads were added to the site. Several of those ads contained the names of people, who then demanded to be removed from the site. The hacker used a script to reupload the information constantly, and effectively was uploading it faster than I could delete it. On August 23, I was able to lock him out. Additional security measures have been put in place since.
08/08/08: The layout was changed and the CSS for the pages has been rewritten. Some additional features, like, e.g. the alphabetical index, and the print friendly version have been implemented. And close to 300 topics were copied from the Hyperbase. These topics still have to be revised!
01/08/08: The first beta version of the Exopaedia was launched on 1 August 2008. This is still a very limited version which will experience several updates in the next weeks, where several additional features will be implemented.