HareKrsna.com Celebrates 10th Anniversary Online Website For Worldwide Hindu Vaisnava Community Celebrates Ten Years Of Service
The HareKrsna.com website publishes one of the world’s largest repositories of information about Vaisnavism, Vedic culture, Bhakti yoga, and eastern philosophy. The site currently receives approximately 800,000 hits per month, making it one of the oldest and most visited Vaisnava sites in the world.
Vancouver, WA (PRWEB) July 30, 2005 -- July 30, 2005 marks the tenth
anniversary of the online presence of HareKrsna.com. On July 30, 1995, Rocana
dasa and wife Jahnava first launched the website from British Columbia, Canada
under the name “The Hare Krsnas”, at www.islandnet.com/~harekrsna.com. Readership was small, with
the regular audience being comprised of friends and peers.
By July of
1996, a variety of content related to spiritual practice (sadhana) and
philosophy was online, and the first public launch of the site took place. Over
the course of that year site content continued to grow, the majority of which
was focused on philosophical debates about ISKCON management and the
guru/disciple initiation issue that was being vigorously debated by the Hare
Krishna community.
On July 29, 1997, the site was re-launched after
being moved to its permanent domain, www.harekrsna.com. Three
interactive venues were added: the Garuda Express listserv, the Dharma Mela
threaded forum, and the Sadhu-Sanga chat room. All three quickly became popular
venues, and helped to establish HareKrsna.com as an important presence in the
Vaisnava community.
In late 2002, the editors began a massive overhaul
of the website, publishing an extensive collection of content related to the
philosophy of Krishna Consciousness, sadhana and Indian culture. In the fall of
2003, the revamped site was launched, with invitations distributed to devotees
worldwide. Site traffic immediately spiked, as search engines like Google
indexed what had become one of the world’s largest repositories of Krsna
Conscious content on the Web.
Over the ten year span of HareKrsna.com’s
life on the Net, site traffic has grown from hundreds of visitors a month to
approximately 800,000 a month, making it one of the top two Krishna sites on the
Net.
A Fascinating Collection of Vedic Content
HareKrsna.com is
comprised of two main wings, “Philosophy” and “Spiritual Practice”. The
Philosophy section contain an extensive collection of material on the
incarnations of God, comparative religions, karma and reincarnation, Vedic
scriptures, and the lineage of instructing Acaryas (spiritual masters) who
present this knowledge according to time, place and circumstance.
In the
Vaisnava Literature section of the site, visitors can enjoy reading and
downloading a rare collection of several hundred works of Vaisnava philosophy.
Many of these books, which have been translated to English from the original
Sanskrit or Bengali, were written after the advent of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu,
the most recent incarnation of Lord Krishna, who appeared in West Bengal about
five hundred years ago.
The Spiritual Practice wing contains information
on practicing Bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotional service), including chanting
the Hare Krsna maha-mantra: Hare Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krsna Hare Hare | Hare
Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare.
Instructions on how to control the
senses, vegetarianism, Deity worship, etc., are also included here along with
the Prasadam (spiritual food) section, which contains an amazing library of more
than 2,000 Indian vegetarian recipes.
The Transcendental Art Gallery,
which is one of the site’s most visited areas, contains more than 1,000
beautiful images of art featuring Lord Krsna, His consort Radharani, and His
incarnations, like Lord Buddha. New art is presented on a regular basis, as the
Site Editors slowly dip into their unique collection of nearly 500,000
historically important and often rare spiritual art images from
India.
Sampradaya Sun News Site
On July 12th of this year, in
honor of their 10th anniversary, HareKrsna.com added a new wing to the site, the
“Sampradaya Sun”. The Sun is an independent news site featuring daily news,
current events, editorials and brahminical commentary for the worldwide Vaisnava
community. Traffic immediately spiked with the Sun’s launch, and is expected to
exponentially vault well over the million hits per month mark before summer’s
end.
A related news service called “Sun Blogs” lets readers comment and
dialogue directly with authors of news and editorial articles published in the
Sun each day. Typically this type of exchange is very limited, slow, or
impossible in a news format venue, where letters to the Editor compete for
limited space, and rebuttal articles meet with tight editorial control.
Contributing Sun writers, however, are held to a higher accountability because
they can expect to receive instant - and multiple - reader comments. This
dynamic places the Sun squarely in the sphere of “new media”, albeit in a
uniquely niche reader market.
The Sampradaya Sun is taking full advantage
of new media streaming technologies. RSS feeds for Sun headlines, Blogs and
PodCasts stream daily content on eastern philosophy and Vedic culture to readers
worldwide, broadcasting out over hundreds of news feed aggregators and feed
search engines around the world.
About HareKrsna.com
The
HareKrsna.com website publishes one of the world’s largest repositories of
information about Vaisnavism, Vedic culture, Bhakti yoga, and eastern
philosophy. The site currently receives approximately 800,000 hits per month,
making it one of the oldest and most visited Vaisnava sites in the
world.
HareKrsna.com is dedicated to spreading the science of Krishna
Consciousness, as instructed by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila
Prabhupada, Sampradaya Acarya and Founder of the International Society for
Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).
Related URL’s:
Homepage – http://www.harekrsna.com
Sampradaya Sun – http://www.harekrsna.com/sun
The Philosophy Section –
http://www.harekrsna.com/philosophy/philosophy.htm
The
Spiritual Practice Section –http://www.harekrsna.com/practice/practice.htm
Transcendental
Art Gallery – http://www.harekrsna.com/gallery/gallery.htm
FOR MORE
INFORMATION:
Jahnava devi, Site Owner, Editor
Phone: (360)
993-0022
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/7/prweb267100.htm