The website’s roadmap

There are lots of decent hosting companies around nowadays. We’ve spent time with several, but in the end it comes down to speed and simplicity, at least for us. The same can be said for software. It’s better when it’s simple.

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Nginx, serving our visitors on the digital ocean of devotional bliss.

• Open source DokuWiki, through and through. No database, simply plain text files.
• At least two dozen active plugins, a few customised. May open source if interest.
• Changed my bootstrap template recently. Less customization options, but fast.

For the books, we used the “Original VedaBase” as our source. For lectures, conversations and letters, we’re extracting from the newer versions of the official VedaBase. Although we spent a lot of time cleaning up these files, we know that they still carry many mistakes. We are trying to correct them as far as possible, both with software tools and proofreading.

Original (pre-1978) editions only. We will accept corrections in footnotes/appendixes.

• Imported all original books.

  • Side-by-side verification with other digital sources.
  • Proofread against original printed or scanned books.
• Devanagari and Bengali script

  • Added Devanagari for bg, iso, noi.
  • Working on adding Devanagari for sb.
  • We’re in need of Bengali/ITRANS file of cc.
• Synonyms (word-for-word translations)

  • Added Sanskrit/Bengali dictionary.

Spoken

• Imported lectures and conversations from VedaBase. Big cleanup!
• Imported audio files when moving to our production server.
• Need to import newer transcripts (currently 1967–71).
• Audio transcripts fidelity check and corrections.

Letters

• Imported letters.
• Add scanned letters.

Media

• Will add these Prabhupāda Videos from YouTube.
• Photo galleries has been on our list for, like 10 years.

Index

I believe a proper index is crucial for studying Srila Prabhupada’s books. A lawyer once told me that an index is the only way to look up anything from the law books, and the only thing missing from the VedaBase. I took her words to heart.

• Digitise all the indexes from Srila Prabhupāda’s books.
• Semi-automatically link to corresponding pages/verses.
• Manually link to paragraphs with optional search phrase.

Wiki

• We’re gradually building our wiki articles internally. Finally!
• Will open for the public once we reach a certain amount.

Glossary

• Imported glossary from VedaBase.

Phase 3: Functionality

• Advanced search engine
• Accessibility improvements
• Many planned enhancements

Phase 4: TBA

• Multilingual?