Victus Spiritus

I’m sure I’m not the only blogger who has wondered about their old web hangouts, creations, and communities.

Before creating sites on the web, about a dozen years ago I setup and heavily modified an old merc diku multi-user dungeon with my friend Aakin. It was fun c coding practice, and I learned a little about sockets. I had a geocities homepage that looked much like my first MySpace page. I also wrote a little in a LiveJournal blog but I deleted it a while back.

I found a pretty intense Internet groove in the latter half of 2008 when I decided to make my own website, and I’d like to share a few of the things I’ve created, and a couple of communities that I got involved in since that time.

Dreamsnare

Dreamsnare was my first web community concept, but the forums there never really took off with shared dream interpretation and eventually only the occasional spam bot visited so I took down the message board. If I do rekindle a shared dream interpretation community, it will be using a great social media support framework like a Drupal community book.

Here’s a little background about dreamsnare from the landing page:

What is Dream Snare? Welcome to DreamSnare.com a shared place for dream analysisand introspection This web locale has been named for the translation of Bwaajige Ngwaagan, the Ojibwe (Chippewa) tribe name for dream catchers.

The driving force behind Dream Snare is to create a shared user community for free dream interpretation and dream submission. The hope is that dreams will be reviewed without unnecessary judgement or bias to their content.

When I was working on Dreamsnare I realized editing the pages, and adding new content, to an html site, to be a slow process. I wanted an easier platform, with many more topics than just dreams, and I was hoping to eventually make income doing it. It turns out that the publishing site Squidoo provided all of this plus internal marketing support.

Squidoo

My first lens (each stand alone web page) on Squidoo, The Profit Prophet has an odd url. It’s called money-love-1 as this was my first title, but I later changed it. In it I discuss why we pursue worldly wealth:

To enjoy the fruits of a free society, financial independence is of vital importance. Without it, your perspective will always be clouded by the necessity to “pay the bills”. You’ll do things in opposition to your life’s passion for a paycheck, and this will cause internal conflict and disharmony. Over the years your childhood dreams of driving your own destiny will wither and fade. The overriding purpose of this page is to inspire self directed change. I’ll discuss a little of what my definition of a Profit Prophet is as well.

I had a bunch of fun writing up squidoo pages covering a diverse set of topics:

Technology

• Neural Interfaces
• Microprojectors
• Netbook Review
• Solid State Hard Drives
• Home Viewing System Review (it quickly grew beyond tvs)
• Open Spectrum
• Intelligent Advertising
• Nintendo DSi

eReaders and eBooks

• eReader Review
• Kindle 2
• Kindle DX
• eBook College Textbooks
• Free eBook Libraries

Business, Marketing, and Career Guidance

• Web Marketing and SEO Tutorial (writing it forced me to learn a little)
• Twitter Tutorial the moment I finished it, I find a nicer looking one
• Don Quixote: the Right Role Model for the Wrong Economy
• Squidoo is a franchise that charges 50% royalties
• Mike Rowe Works
• Netflix Marketing With Prizes (to me this was genius, and I even got a chance to chat with the winning team, The Ensemble who are actively seeking out algorithm projects & contracts)
• Entrepreneur or Entremanure?
• Financial Reporting

Health, Energy, and Weird Alchemical Stuff

• Redline Power Rush
• Energy Bars
• Ayahuasca: Hacking into your subconscious mind

Gaming (video, and rpg)

• World of Warcraft Death Knights
• Victus Games
• Children of the Ark
• Science Fiction Roleplaying Games

Philosophy, Dreams, Holidays + Interesting Grab Bag

• The Profit Prophet
• Are you addicted to free time?
• Erin Go Bragh
• Why New Years Resolutions?
• Smoke and Mirrors (a rehash of one of my dreamsnare pages)
• Lucid Dreams
• Battle of Wits – Imagination Challenge

Where am I now?

If you’re still with me, awesome. Near the end of my new squidoo lens days, I found that I could write on my own platform. Tweaking the webpages and site however I desired. From this early idea, Victus Spiritus was born. I started at typepad but eventually moved the blog to it’s own domain a month or so later. From my perspective WordPress (thanks Matt Mullenweg & Automattic) gives much more flexibility to users on a hosted domain over my original typepad setup.

Communities…

I think my digital shadow of web communities will have to wait for another post.

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