What's New
Site Updates of IAS & Manjushri-Mandala
FEBRUARY 1999
Opening of our Bookshop
in cooperation with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Hans went through his
library and put together a selection of 93 Astrology books (English &
German), grouped in beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. Concerning
Tibetan Buddhism he choose 66 titles (also grouped in 3 levels). For Astronomy
36 books are recommended. Most titles have direct links to Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de. This book lists will be updated continously.
In February our site was honored
with 60 new
Awards which can
be viewed on awards pages 8-13. As a new feature every single award can
be also clicked from the awards-entry page. Here you can also read a few
keywords, describing the contents of the according awards-submitting pages.
Sites of extra special interest are marked with stars (*/**/***). Whow,
this awards section is very work-intensive to design and to maintain. But
we think it's worth it, testing our site against the international standards.
In terms of metals it seems that we are a 'Silver' site, even though some
rate us as bronze or even gold.
We also installed a Free
Linksite, where everybody can leave his URL. We are astonished
how few people make use of it!
We decided also to become a member
of the
Webring: 'Mythos &
Logos' and shared following New Age
Groups: Amorology.net, New Civilization, Great Thinkers, World
Peace, World Transformation, Deoxy.org, Pathways, Western Lands, Spiritech
UK and Global Visions. Of course we can't identify with all the views of
participating sites but we simply want to demonstrate our shared hope for
a better and more spiritual orientated world.
Thomas created 2 photo Animations
of us, his first experiments with a new software.
Due to a complete lack of cooperation
of a German webmaster and Astrologer the online Taeger-Archives
(already finished late summer 98) are not installed yet. We will look for
a new solution in March. Wish us luck.
Knowing about the loads of already
scanned texts and galleries we expanded the capacity of our site to 100
MB. Will be 400 MB if somebody installs our online archives!
In February we had 665 visitors,
mainly from USA, Ireland and Germany.-
MARCH 1999
We extended our Bookshop
and added 24 interesting titles on New Age Spirituality and 45 titles on
psychedelic issues. March brought us 50 new site awards
for content, design and creativity (Awards Pages 13-16). For our nearly
200 Web Awards we feel very proud and and want to thank all awards-giving
websites and their reviewers *very* much. As a new option to navigate our
expanding site we created a Site Directory
page. Under Buddhism we added some biographical notes to honor our teacher
Tenga
Tulku Rinpoche. (Biographies of our other teachers will follow soon).
The biographies of Hans Taeger became a facelifting and all sub-pages became
a new design. The Astrology Newsletter-
and Mailinglists of Tees Retsma are
updated. March brought us 582 visitors to our Menu Page. Following site
statistics our most frequented pages are: Thangka
Gallery, Psychedeliscope :-) Taeger
Biography, Mentor,
Search
Engines (worth to bookmark!),
Awards
and New Age Webgroups. We worked
also on many older pages and installed some beautiful fractal backgrounds.
13 kind people signed our guestbook and we are in the stage of uploading
our astrological archives, which will be soon available.
APRIL 1999
This month was dedicated to prepare
a lot of new pages, which will be online midth of May (3 Photo Galleries
on Ireland, Donegal and Portsalon, a page on our house & garden, detailed
biographies on Lama Yeshe and Kalu Rinpoche, some teachings by Lama Yeshe,
a teaching by Kalu Rinpoche on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, some thangka
pages, an updated Spanish version of the Taeger bio). Thomas is installing
a comfortable Site Navigator and preparing a text-only-directory. The Taeger-Archives
are uploaded and successfully tested. But we are not yet finished with
the English user instructions and the online order facilities for the CD-ROM
version. So please be patient until June. We are working full speed but
don't want to risk a heart infarct!- We installed monitor functions for
the complete site and found out that we have an average of 4000 unique
hits per month from more than 300 referrers. The page on Astrology
Congresses 1999/2000 is updated, we received 55 new awards(pages
16-20) and 15 kind people signed our guestbook.
MAY 1999
Sorry, we are still in the stage
of preparing some wonderful pages. Things take longer than expected! But
we managed to give our award galleries
a complete face-lift, having received amazing 62 new site awards (pages
20-25). Being a Netscape site we forgot for a while to test our pages with
Explorer. Oh my, we discovered a lot of ugly looking distortions and disfunctions!
This will keep us busy to midth of June! In the meantime send us some kind
prayers to find the energy and time for all this boring work. Thanx!
JUNE 1999
The Amazon book
pages and the Abbreviation Lists
of the Taeger-Archives are updated. Our site has become now also an associate
of Amazon.de (German books). As a option we created
3 biorhythms pages for online calculations
and with commentaries by Hans. This
month our site received amazing 90 awards
(pages 25-31). Thanx to everybody! According to Gayla's Garden awards pages
we are among the top ten highest awarded sites in the net :-) - For anybody
who would like to link to our site we
have created a page with our banners. Many pages are updated for a better
viewing with Explorer. There are also 6 new pages on all book
titles of Hans Taeger (content & descriptions/bilingual). This
month brought us 5300 unique visitors.
JULY 1999
Update of the psychedelic
webring page. Joined the 'Psychedelic Joint Webring' with 280 members
& the 'Cannabis Directory'with more than 500 members. - Sites which
awarded us, gave us a favour or put a major banner-link to us, may receive
our "IAS & Manjushri Mandala Kindness
Reward 1999". If you gave us an award before July, please send us a
notice to receive the Kindness Award. This award cannot be applied for.
- We will start a public awards-program with the begin of the new millenniom
(1st of January 2000). - We are now listed in the Top
Ten List of the most awarded homepages in the net (place 7). Quite
amazing! We designed 6 new banners in
the standard sizes 400 x 40 and 460 x 60 and redesigned/updated 45 pages
(marked 'July 99' at the bottom). Our site received 105 stunning awards
(galleries 31-37) this month and got 7,000 unique hits (mainly from USA,
Germany, UK, Portugal, Australia). 35 sites proudly display our Kindness
Award.
AUGUST 1999
We added more than 30 completely
new or completely redesigned Buddhist pages and installed a Buddhist
Sub-Menu, which lists all Buddhist pages in detail. There are now 66
Buddhist pages. Major Buddhist new pages are:
Biographical
Notes on Kalu Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche:
The 6 Bardos & The Nature of Mind,
Lama Yeshe,
A Milestone in My Life, Lama Yeshe:
Buddhist Way of Thought,
Geshe
Rabten: Remarks on Buddhist Philosophy, Geshe
Rabten (Biographical Notes),
Gangchen
Tulku: The Healing Lama, Gangchen
Tulku (Photo Impressions),
Zong Rinpoche
(Biographical Notes) and many other minor pages (see Sub-Menu).
We also added new titles to Buddhist bookshop.
Even though it was holiday season we received 120 nice awards
(galleries 37-46) and a record high of at least 10,000 unique hits.
SEPTEMBER 1999
A bit lazy month :-) But we managed
to re-arange and re-design the Guestbook Pages,
the Awards-Galleries and updated the astrological
Mailing Lists,- Newsletter Lists and
Congress
Preview for 99 & 2000. We also added an AltaVista window to our
popular Search Engines Pages. September
brought us a record high of more than 11,000 unique hits, a 5th place among
the Top 10 most awarded personal websites and 122 new awards (galleries
46-55).
OCTOBER 1999
Re-design and updating of various
pages (to many to list). Thomas started to get used to our new Photoshop
5.0 (+ Image Ready). Results will show in the next month's. We also installed
a new computer with all accompanying problems and nervous breakdowns (Gateway
2000, Pentium III, 21" monitor, 19GB, 386 RAM, Windows NT 4.0 - Service
Pack 5.0) and upgraded our other Gateway (Pentium II, 17" monitor, 19 GB,
386 RAM, Windows NT 4.0 - Service Pack 5.0). October granted us 122 new
awards (galleries 56-64) and a 4th place in the Top 10 list.
NOVEMBER 1999
Complete re-design of our awards
galleries and starting of a Gifts & Memento
Collection. Hans started a little gallery of psychedelic sketches and
diary pages of the early 70's (will be online next month). We kindly received
116 wonderful awards (galleries 65-72). On the 25th of Nov. we reached
the magic mark of 1000 awards as the
4th homepage in the net (after Axel's
Homeworld, Sten
Lassen and The
Little Dog Joschi). A little bit of Internet history. We hope that
many will enjoy this unique collection and use it for applying! A warm
Thankyou to all reviewers who made this possible! We also had a record
high of more than 12,000 unique hits for the whole site. We prepared a
lot of new pages and features (e-cards, forum's, web-radio, quick navigator,
awards program and more) which will be available in a couple of weeks.
If we just could clone ourselves to work quicker (- even complicated for
tantric Buddhists)!
DECEMBER 1999
If you really want to get bored
look at our new tables of.Site
Statistics.for
the period of April to Nov. 99 (6 pages). Don't miss our highly scientific
and enlightening commentaries 's'. We addded 4 great recources to our New
Age Linksite : Light Matrix, The Mystica, NewHeaven NewEarth, World
of Metaphysics (highly recommended). - Looking for some special fonts for
our site changed into a major adventure of surfing through some 7,000 freewarer
fonts. As a by-product we decided to make up a couple of pages withfonts
we liked. Have a look. We also gave a face-lift to: Taeger's
Books and Taeger's Teacher's. December
brought us 12,800 unique hits, a 3rd place in the Top 10 list and 88 nice
awards.
- 1999:.Since
we introduced our site tracking (April 99) we've counted a minimum of 77,000
unique visitors. 220 kind people signed our guestbook, 91 used our freelink
option, 70 sites banner-linked to us, more than 390 sites gave us a text-link,
280 sites accepted our Kindness Award and we were honored with 1050 awards
during this period. We received also loads of interested & interesting
emails and established some wonderful cyber-friendships. Thank you each
and everyone! 1999 was really packed with enjoyment and hard work :-)
- For the last year of the old
century (2000) we wish you much creativity, new insights and spiritual
growth, and prepare for a New Age (Millennium) which starts against all
rumours in January 2001. IAS & Manjushri Mandala -
JANUARY 2000
After some long inner fights we
decided to check by and by all our major pages against IE 5.0. This will
take a couple of months. We love Bill Gates for this traumatic and time-consuming
job! But we owe it to our IE users. Most of the average surfers with their
pre-installed MSIE are simply afraid dealing with the many technical problems
of co-installing Netscape or change to Netscape completely. This is the
whole mystery IE became so 'popular' and makes millions of webmasters so
desperate :-) The same problems arise of course vis versa. - We all hope
that this will once be a problem of the past. All pages marked at the bottom
with Jan. or Febr. 00 are already checked against Explorer (around 25 pages).
- Thomas designed our new Kindness
Award 2000. January brought us an unexpected record high of 24,000
visitors. The index- and menupage got a new look and we received some stunning
designed 130 awards and a great feeback from all over the world. Thank
you all! We answer all emails. Just have some patience.
FEBRUARY 2000
First of all a happy, creative,
inspirational and healthy Buddhist Iron-Dragon year, which starts at New
Moon, Febr. 5th. A year for new and powerful decisions. - We updated our
funny to read and amazing pages on our site
statistics, which cover now the period of 10 month (April 99 - January
00). - Like to find out in what year you are born? Pick up a Tibetan New
Year's gift? Click our new page: Tibetan Calendar
System.
- In a non-stop marathon and energetic
fight we *completely* redesigned all 108 awards related pages (reviews,
galleries, gifts) to please all explorers. Bill Gates, if you have a minimum
of honor you ow us at least some luxury holidays on the Bahamas! And do
us a favor, don't develop further explorers! - We decided also to participate
at 2 new interesting newage-projects ('One Spirit' and 'Spirit Search').
They are listed under
Spiritual Webgroups.
In February we did receive 137 beautiful awards, did post 1800 New Year's
greetings and New Year's gifts and gave our Kindness Award 2000 to 150
sites.
MARCH 2000
We updated our quite unique &
popular
Collection of 160 Search-Engines,
added new links and 12 additional search windows for:
Googles
(amazing fast service!), Altavista (for all languages),
MSN Search
(Microsoft), C4 Total Search (multiple search/simply great), Monster
Crawler (multiple search), ditto.com (image-search), Who
Where (people finder/- email section),
one2seek
(Metasearch/- multiple search section),
1
Blink Com (multiple search section) and the
German
search engines windows for
Fire-Ball, Lycos.de and Dino.
- For those who don't have a translation facility with their browser we
installed 'Babel Fish' from Altavista. At this Translation
Office you can copy and paste plain text or URL's of our site for simple
translations from English to: French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.
At the moment this translation link is only accessible from the main menu
and the site directory. You need a certain amount of humor to work with
those translations, but occasionally one get's a rough understanding :-)
- We opened also a little gallery (23 pages) with psychedelic
sketches and diary pages created by Hans in the early 70's. Each
page has some pro,
critical.and.general.quotes
from various researchers, spiritual teachers and practitioners, concerning
interrelations between psychedelic experiences, Buddhism and results of
traditional meditation practices.
- We've also updated the listings
of
Astrology Congresses 2000-2001,
the
Astrological Mailing Lists, and
the
Astrological Newsgroups & Newsletters.
- In March our site got more than 26,000 unique hits and received 100 stunning
awards.
APRIL 2000
Thomas designed 3 additional &
beautiful banner logos for our site.
- As a notorious collector Hans put together a remarkable collection of
hand-picked witty wisdom quotes he found by surfing the net
or in various books and magazines. To add to all the eye-candy some spicy
mind-food we added to our various awards and gifts gallery's a selection
of more than 400 quotes. Some separate quote pages will follow later.
- We've updated our guestbook
section, splitted our first guestbooks entries (Nov. 98- April 2000)
in 7 subpages, redesigned the actual guestbook, added a second guestbook
option (Bravenet), and offer a guestbook gift now. - Attention:.It
came to our attention that somebody uses the email addresses of our guestbooks
to send unsolicited mails, using our guestbook URL as a reference. Please
be assured that those mails have obsolutely nothing to do with us or our
site! - In April we had 20,000 unique hits and did receive 102 site awards.
MAY 2000
We became Site of the Month (May)
at Dear
B and Mountain
Astrologer's Web Page Review of the Month (May). Thank you both! 'Breton
Humors' declared us 'The
Most Original Site of the Year' (look at this great designed page of
honor).
- We decided to join the 'Inspiring
Sites Webring' (see Spiritual Webgroups).
- Thomas designed 5 stunning mini-banners
(31x88). We hope they find some friends (see banner-URL).
- May brought us 22,000 unique visitors and we received 115 wonderful and
surprising awards.
JUNE 2000
Hans finished the online version
of his 'Witty Wisdom Quotes' (5 pages),
sorted by categories, keywords and even a personal rating. A result of
extracting aprox. 450 quotes, working through some 60,000 quotes. He added
also a little collection of his own thoughts and quotes. The collection
will be enlarged every 2 or 3 months.
- We installed a new and more comfortable
'Freelinks Site' (Bravenet) with the
option to describe your URL more detailed (not just a few keywords). We
kept our old freelinks page for viewing only.
- We decided to join two more new
age orientated and interesting webrings: 'Class Act Realms' and 'Open Your
Mind' (see.Spiritual
Webgroups).
- The Inspiring Sites Webring made
us to. Site-Of-the-Month.(for
June2000). Thanks a lot, Fantasy Dreamer, Whisper and all members who voted
for us. - June brought us 21,000 unique visitors and 75 site awards.
Most visited pages were: Tibetan Thangka Gallery, Biorhythms, Psychedelic
Sketches, Search Engines, Wisdom Quotes, various Buddhist pages and the
awards galleries.
JULY 2000
- As everybody knows it's holiday
time and we think we've earned it too :-) So there are just minor cosmetics
at some pages. But behind closed doors a second gallery of psychedelic
sketches, a teaching of Kalu Rinpoche on Mahamudra, additions to our wisdom
quotes, and our awards-program are under heavy construction :-) In July
23,000 unique visitors got lost in our pages and we thankfully received
117 new awards.
AUGUST 2000
- We became Site of the Month (August)
from the 'Linc's Links'
website (read review/gallery 138)
and from 'Lady
Care's Realm on the Web' (read review/gallery
140). For all those wonderful gifts & free-awards we get or find, while
surfing around we opened a new gifts-gallery (gifts-7).
Don't miss to surf through our unique gifts and memento galleries. In the
Top
Ten List we climbed up to the second place (for how long?). - Due to
an unexpected invasion of visitors from Europe and the States many projects
are on ice :-(( but not forgotten. On top of it we've got 23,000 cyber-guests
and 112 of them left back a nice award! We redesigned our entry page and
de-activated our javaflash welcome. Too many visitors with older browsers
got stuck in this color-bombardment (even though color is the essence of
our site). - We also entered the 'Top 100 Astrologers' list, the 'Astrobit
Top Astrology Sites' link-directory and 'Psychics.com' (see: 'New
Age Groups').
SEPTEMBER 2000
-  .On
1st of September we received our 2000th award. Want to have a look
;-) - We added 170 quotes to our Witty
Wisdom Quotes Collection. - Thomas created a new banner
(# 13) and we started a new gifts-page (gifts/8).
- We finished a new Buddhist page with an important teaching from H. E.
Kalu Rinpoche on Mahamudra, a page on
Lama
Panchen Ötrul Rinpoche as well as a page on Amitayus
Buddha. - In honor of business tycoon Bild Gates we made most major
Buddhist pages Explorer compatible (-not eye-dentical). - On September
20th we became the most awarded homepage in the net. - Nick Ribush, our
friend and one of the directors of the Lama Yeshe & Lama Zopa centres
surprised us with the precious 'The Dr. Nick award for enthusiastic perseverance'
:-) Because it's a Buddhist award it can't be seen of course. It's simply
formless and empty. Thanks, Nick. - In September we had 27,000 unique hits
and received 142 stunning awards.
OCTOBER 2000
- Look for this stunning but a
bit early birthday gift from Thomas
to Hans. Hope it doesn't blow my ego :-) - We updated our Wrathful
Green Tara page (now with enlargement). - We just started a Free
Gifts page.with
some stunning designs for your site! Check from time to time for newly
added gifts. - Due to a highly unprofessional outcome of the merger between
Webring.org and Yahoo, we cancelled all our webring memberships (9). Yahoo
certainly deserves a special award for the most un-inspiring webdesign
:-) So we say good bye and a warm thank you to all intiator's and remaining
members of those rings! It's definitely not their fault. - In October we've
got more than 31,000 unique hits, were honored with 145 beautiful awards
and became Kitty
GreyCat's.Site
of the Month.
NOVEMBER 2000
- Mystic
Worlds.made
us their Site of the Month. Thank you, Silverwolf. On several pages (Menu,
Director, Quick Directory, Search Our Site, Search-Engines) we installed
a new search-window from Gooogle from where you either can search *our
site* or the WWW. A great new option! - Thomas created a stunning digital
remodelled Vajrapani.image.
- This month we mainly designed many new gifts and awards and are still
in the process of checking, updating and re-modelling all our awards- and
review pages (a very time-consuming work for stronge nerves). - In November
our site received a minimum of 31,000 unique hits and 110 awards. Thank
you all!
DECEMBER 2000
- This month was mainly used to
create heaps of new graphics, logos, borders, awards, gifts etc. which
will be displayed in January. Some pages are slightly re-designed and updated.
Hans is still heavily envolved getting the awards-section renovated and
re-organized. We have a new page up with New
Year's gifts.for
the Western Jupiter-Year 2001 and the the Tibetan Iron-Serpent year, starting
at 23rd of February 2001). We hope you enjoy them! - We wish all visitors
and friends of our site a great start into the new Millennium!!! Thank
you for being with us, Hans & Thomas. - In December we had a minimum
of 33,000 unique hits and received 63 awards.
JANUARY 2001
- The actual AOL-Netscape 6.is
a complete disaster! Our recommendation: don't download yet! Wait and pray
for a better version (wish them some inspiration and reason). With other
words our Netscape-site is not.compatible
to AOL-NS 6 and, at least in this lifespan, we don't have any ambitions
to re-write hundreds of pages! - The new 'Manjushri Mandala Kindness Award
2001' has a complete new look and comes this year in 4 graduations (Merit,
Bronze, Silver and Gold). It has also new criteria which will be soon online.
For pets- and animal related sites we give now 'Champa Dorje's Great Surf
Award'. Also here criteria and winners lists will be soon available. We
are still in the process of checking and re-designing our awards-section.
Thomas designed 18 beautiful awards and several new gifts. All online in
February. Hans collected 250 new witty quotes which will be added soon.
- January brought us a minimum of 36,500 unique hits. A big Thanx to all
reviewers! They left back 90 stunning awards for our collection. February
and March will bring a lot of new features we prepared over the last months.
Stay tuned.
FEBRUARY 2001
- Not much to say. A month of sickness,
confusion and chaos. First a swolen toe of Hans. Transfer into a hospital.
20 Doctor's staring at Hans' toe. Discussions about amputation. Hundreds
of tests, all confirming Hans' good health condition. Doctor's at the end
of their Latin. Escaping the hospital-madness on own risk. Straight to
a chiropodist. 5 minutes to cut out a little piece of a grown-in nail which
20 doctor's were not able to see (but Hans had always in mind). Toe totally
recovered, but followed by a next disaster. As an extra hospital-bonus
a flue infection by one of those resistant hospital viruses. 3 weeks of
feverish influenza with both, Thomas and Hans. Still not fully recovered.
Only positive result: Hans lost 20 pounds of weight. But we both still
look like aliens and it could take a while to get back to normal. Thanks
to all Buddhist deities that they didn't start an open heart-surgerey.
- A good reason to speak occasionally some prayer's or mantras for all
those millions of wrongly diagnozed and treated patients worldwide. And
think twice before getting a victim of this costly hospital-madness. -
- Thankyou for more than of 34,000
unique hits and some 60 awards. Wish us luck and a speedy recovery. Thanks,
Hans & Thomas.
MARCH 2001
- Still checking and updating the
awards galleries (20 galleries left). Five additional awards for our awards-programm
designed (by now 25 different awards). We also finished 12 beautiful zodiac
plaques, which will be soon online (together with 15 additional gifts)
and we collected 500 new wisdom quotes (soon online). All this is very
time consuming. So have patience with us :-)
- In March we had a record high
of more than 37,500 unique hits and received 55 awards. Spring is in full
bloom in Ireland (including hayfever) and our 2 acres of garden need a
lot of attention. We wish you (and us) a creative astrological New Year,
which started at the 20th of March (sun entering aries).
April 2001
- We decided to put up a.Provisional
Awards-Program..with
16 new awards which can be applied from now on. Thomas did a great job
with the design of the logos! The time of uploading was: 25th of April,
15:40 WET/ST, Portsalon/Ireland (for the astrologers amongst you). The
full awards-program with 30 pages, 10 more awards and detailed criteria
for each award is still under construction. - The checking of all 2700
award URL's is finished. We could rediscover around 400 changed URL's using
search engines and detective-like thinking. We updated all keywords, ratings,
country the award came from, birthdata, gender, browser recommendations,
are the awards continued or not, new features, java or flash enhanced.
We did spent an average of at least 40 minutes on each site which gives
a surfing time of 1,700 hours (spent from late October 2000-April 2001).
We should right now have the cleanest and most updated awards-gallery of
this size. Use this great option.and
hurry to surf for awards and visit some great places! We did all this for
you!
Our main reference for all updates are the review-pages. Some sites change
their URL on a weekly basis. So please help us to keep our review pages
and galleries clean and drop us a note if you find any URL's which went
down in the meantime. Enjoy and good luck! Wow, what wonderful mind-training
to develop patience and one-pointed concentration. On top of it deepening
the wisdom that everything is changes. So it really was a Buddhist workshop
:-) , even though not an easy one. - From 26th of April to 1st of
May our email-server was down. Anybody who contacted us during this period,
should send his mail again. - Second problem: our 500 MB account is more
than full and we have to start a new site having the same capacity of 500MB
but a differing URL address. So it may be happen, that some links bring
you on anther URL. But there are always links back, so you never get lost
:-) April brought us again more than 37,500 unique hits and we thankfully
received 65 awards for our site.
May 2001
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