Purpose

The Ethereal Matters (EM) website is intended as a forum or discussion place for electric universe theories.  A place where people can post their own theories, comment on other theories, and write articles about issues regarding the Electric Universe.

In order to get a theory accepted by society, you either have to post papers in relevant journals and convince the mainstream, or take it directly to the people. Since the journals aren't interested in this material, we have to take it to the people. The Ethereal Matters website is being created to do just that.  The plan is to eventually build this into an Electric Universe Academy.

Most of the websites in our community are one direction - the owner publishes an article and others can read it. Readers may be able to post comments but they can't start their own article or create their own section on the site.  Therefore the burden of creating new material is left to the site owner and maybe a small group of others.  I certainly don't know everything and definitely can't keep up on it all. I created the Ethereal Matters website so that anyone can add content and contribute. We need to get as many people as possible reading, discussing and even arguing about the EU so that the Mainstream can no longer ignore it.

James and Drupal

I am a professional website developer with over 40 years programming experience. Most of my work has been in the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry working with huge datasets.  My forte is creating simple and easy to use interfaces for users to find and visualize complex data.

The last 10 years I have been working with Drupal. Drupal is typically used by big organizations to manage large amounts of custom data. Many universities, governments, and large publishing companies use Drupal because of it's ability to be customized. (Wordpress is a similar product. It is easier to use but less capable and is geared more towards smaller blogs and newsletters.)  

For the last 2.75 years I have been working with Edo to create a 3D simulation of his Structured Atom Model.  This simulation has been vital in advancing the theory.  He originally developed his ideas using spherical magnets, however larger elements were impossible because the magnets have a mind of their own and would stick together or fall apart and you had to start over.  With this 3D software Edo can create his atoms with no help from me.  He can play with different configurations to his hearts content.

I have also created a 3D simulation of Don Scott's model of Birkeland currents (Press the play button under the word "Animations" in the sidebar.  Then press the second icon (a bar chart) that is at the top left of the sidebar.

We are in early talks with Bruce Leybourne to recreate software he has used for modeling the interior of the earth.  In addition I'm talking with Don Scott about recreating Anthony Peratt's computer simulation showing how a spiral barred galaxy can simulated using known behavior of electromagnetism.

With Drupal all these simulations can be embedded into a page such as this.

Ethereal Matters Multi-site

The Ethereal Matters website is really more than a single site. Drupal custom modules allow for multiple sites to be created from a single installation.  Each site can have it's own theme, layout, colors and most importantly content.  An article can be configured to be displayed on one or more of the sites.  Users are logged in to a single site but from their perspective it appears to be multiple sites.

Right now it is only displayed as a single site - etherealmatters.org.  However a second site is very close to being released - structuredatom.com.  The Structured Atom site is for creating a discussion place for the Structured Atom Research Group which Edo and I participate in. This group came out of the ICCF-21 (International Conference on Cold Fusion) conference held in Fort Collins, Colorado last June.  Their current communications are through email which is horribly ineffective.  Emails are notoriously hard to search and organize - people are continually left off of mailing lists - a newcomer has no way to go back and read old emails - and the email group is private, the rest of the world cannot participate.

One of the most successful sites in our arena is Ben Davidson's Suspicious Observers suite of websites. He has his parent site - suspiciousObservers.org and the child sites -  spaceweathernews.com,  quakewatch.net, observatoryproject.com, and magneticreversal.org.  He appears to be making a living at this and is even supporting additional research.  Maybe he is on to something.

Content Types

Drupal allows for different types of content and many ways to organize and categorize that content.

• Communities provide a way to group people by their interests and to control what they can do on the site. Users can be assigned roles within communities.  As I've configured it now they can be a simple member, a contributor, a reviewer or an administrator.  These roles determine what that member can do within a community.  One community can allow anyone to post new content. Another community can limit posting to just a few people.  Selected content within a community can be deemed as private - this means it can only be viewed by a member with the appropriate role.
• Articles are intended for stories that more or less stand on their own and relate to current events, new theories, etc. It's a good way to introduce an new idea.
• Book Pages are placed into a book with chapters and subchapters.  They organize pages that are interrelated.  The site is structured such that each community has it's own book and it is displayed on the left side of the community pages as shown on the Structured Atom Models home page here.
• Articles are intended for stories that more or less stand on their own and relate to current events, new theories, etc. It's a good way to introduce an new idea.
• Comments are used for others to respond and can be nested.
• Events are used to list conferences, meetups, etc.
• Topics are used to categorize articles, book pages, events, resources, etc.  They are used to display a "Related Content" block in the sidebar of an article or book page.  Users can also use Topics to filter lists of content when looking for something to read.
• Resources are used to store images, videos, internal documents (powerpoint slides, pdf's, white papers), links to documents found external to the site, and more. Each resource has an author, create date, list of topics and file size.   In addition each type of resource can have additional data.  For example images can have geolocation data for where the image was taken.  Resources can be embedded in an article, book page, etc.  If your article references a youtube video then that video can be embedded in your article and displayed there.
• Footnotes can be added to any type of content and can refer to a resource.

All content has revisions and a revision history. It is easy to determine when a change is made, who made it, and what the changes were.

Emails

Getting people to read content on a site like this is difficult. You can't expect people to log in daily and check to see if there is something new. Therefore it is imperative that people receive email notifications when there is new content.

For the last couple months I've been working to interface with an email provider, MailChimp, to send emails and to manage subscriptions. By law all emails are required to provide links to unsubscribe, they must contain specific content, etc.  Using a service like MailChimp makes this aspect easier, it's their job to make emails legal or to have them not be considered spam.  In addition they provide tracking and reports to analyze how successful the emails are.

I hope to have email working by Feb 10. I'm real close. Once this is in place then the real launch of Ethereal Matters begins.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to this site then what I've written here.  In addition it is built on the technology of future web sites. Large websites like this are increasingly being broken into a front end and back end.  Drupal is the back end - it provides the content management, user management, permissions, and workflows.  The front end is what displays the content onto the many types of devices out there - computers, phones, tablets, kiosks, refrigerators, etc.  

I'd really like to work with the EU folks in Europe and use this site for your needs also.  We have similar goals.  Projects like this typically take a team of 5-10 developers a year or more to create.   In my experience this site could easily cost more than $2 million USD.  Early on I kept waiting for someone to finance this project, then I realized I didn't have to wait, I can do it myself. I feel it's what I've been working for and my destiny.

Please take a look at the site.  Let me know what you think.