Empowerment's first full-time headquarters is opening in Indianapolis! This house is the dedicated development and coding collective for Empowerment and Viralink projects.

What: Come and celebrate the grand opening with the team and try demonstration versions of Empowerment's new iPhone and Facebook apps.

Why: This opening is a historic moment for the Empowerment project and we hope to see you there to celebrate our new workplace and dedicate ourselves to the cause of universal human empowerment.

Who: The Empowerment development team and community, including you!

When: August 1, 2008 2-5PM Eastern / 11-2PM Pacific. HQ will be operational two weeks beforehand, but will OFFICIALLY open for business on the 1st. Drop by all day. The party will likely rage long into the night.

Where: 952 Eastern Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46201, next store to Pugsley, 2 houses down.

SECOND LIFE: If you can't make it to Indianapolis, attend virtually via our Second Life HQ next store to Rant Hunker Downs.

RSVP if you are going to attend with Facebook

I got the first prototype version of the Empower iPhone app working with the help of jtbandes, a talented young man from freenode's #iphonedev channel.

The xcode project with source code produced so far is attached here, with SVN coming soon.

Here's a teaser screenshot of what the first hacked prototype looks like so far:

We are going to develop a world-class Empowerment interface for iPhone and win next year's Apple Design Award for best iPhone App.

Empowerment for iPhone is important because empowering missions mostly take place in the real world not at the computer at which they might be planned but not executed. So when you are in the field you need the technology at your fingertips to manage and review missions.

GTD In The Field

It will be valuable for integration with our facebook layer too, and it will incorporate or link to external GTD task management via OmniFocus or something like it.

Our implementation of GTD should essentially be socially enabled GTD. Not only can you manage your own tasks, but also you can collaborate with others on them and track progress socially with "group GTD" essentially.

Offline Data Reference

All the pages that users add to their profile will be archived for instantaneous offline viewing. This way you can reviw a skill the moment you need a refresher.

Empowerment Studios is a music and video production outfit for recording and developing revolutionary creative projects.

Primary Tools

• Interface: Presonus FireStudio Project Firewire
• Mic: Rode NT1A Condenser Noiseless
• Cables: Monster ProAdvantage
• Computer: MacBook Pro Dual 2.4GHz 4GB
• Software: Logic Studio, Reason, Live
• Monitors: alesis M1 520 active monitors

I made two upgrades to the comment system this morning.

I completed a Drupal Development mission called "Email notification upon replies to your nodes and comments so you can follow threads and respond".

Now when someone replies to your comments, you get an email so you can continue the conversation!

I'm not sure if you get an email when someone replies to your node in the first place yet though. Comment here to test this new feature. 

I also gave comment headers a light blue background to make it easier to see which reply buttons replied to which comments. 

Empowerment Headquarters is the first office for Empowerment doers to collaborate on EmpowerThyself and many other projects.

Location: 948 Eastern Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46201

Facilities: 2 2-story 3-bedroom houses

A friend just sent me a link to this 404 error page and it hit me: We need great 404 pages like this. Here's one of many lists of great 404s.

I want to have multiple 404s and randomize between them so that people will continually be amused and even refresh the 404 trying to see them all. Please submit ideas for new 404s, your favorite already-existing 404 designs, or to really do a great job attach completely designed zip files containing necessary HTML and media files.

Anyone can try this by leaving comments or attaching files and the first one to do the mission gets Gold Stars credit for the mission.

My Profile: I was unaware until Forrest pointed it out that the most important page on the entire site was inaccessible to non-admins for over a month since I introduced it!

My Profile is the page that begins to show what "Empower Yourself" really means. Everything you create and do comes together here as you empower yourself. It's not the final polished interface, but it puts it all together in one place for the first time.

Next step is to make a user's profile visible to other users just as nicely and unify it with Account Info / Interests / Etc.

Tag Cloud: Tags now have a nice icon link that goes to a tag cloud where you can see which tags are most popular and click any tag to see every node tagged with it.

Mac-like list view colors: I made table lists use alternating blue and white table row colors with just a thin line at the top to make exploring pages like My Profile on the site easier on the eyes. This gives me perverse pleasure. Why this isn't Drupal's default I don't know. I would love to have an influence on future Drupal defaults once the site gets more refined, especially with our Icons module which should become Drupal core.

Missions: I've rebranded tasks/doable actions as MISSIONS because it is a whole lot cooler and more exciting to take an important mission assignment than it is to have some petty tasks "to-do". The icon for Missions is a checkbox to represent the "as good as doneness" of a mission assigned to an empowered doer.

Ideapedia.org, Skillpedia.org, Toolpedia.org, Mediapedia.org: I've rebranded the content sections of EmpowerThyself with a consistent "-pedia" suffix naming convention. This is in keeping with our connection to the Encyclopedist tradition begun by the late Denis Diderot and the more recent Wikipedia in the question to make all human knowledge freely available. Domains are still being redirected but you can reach them all through empowerthyself.com for now. Giving each section an identity will appeal to users who come looking for specific content like how-to skill guides, tool reviews and ideological discussions. They will feel at home within the section they begin, but they will be introduced to the larger scope in which their entry point fits. I will work on adding more distinctive "branding" to each section in the layout.

New "Groups" icon: Groups is now a cool trio of empowered doers showing that the two extra doers have got the first doers' back.

New "Empowerment.tv Podcast" Icon: The generic feed icon now has waves emanating from the empowered symbol with a .TV next to it.

What's New now includes Popular Content: See what has been getting clicked the most.

I'm releasing the new and improved version 7 of the Empower Thyself desktop picture and poster and an overhaul of the way the header cityscape version looks on the site so that it will stretch to monitors as big as 1600 pixels wide. Bonus gold stars if you can spot the easter eggs in a comment.