It began in 2007 when our publisher Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami said it was time to upgrade the Hinduism Today website and move into the Web 2.0 world, complete with blogs, Twitter and video. We hired a professional web designer, adopted a high-tech content management system and went to work. Finally after a year and a half of effort, and a lot of expense, we retired our trusty 15-year-old site in June 2009. We are now colorful and modern, with content better organized for easier access. New features include a video channel, direct PDF downloads, comments from Hindu Press International and an area focused on our book, What Is Hinduism? Each quarter the home page fills with brand new material from the current issue.
Another giant step was to encompass video production sufficiently to launch a Hinduism Today You Tube Channel. See www.youtube.com/hinduismtodayvideos [www.youtube.com/hinduismtodayvideos]. Viewers get to see Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami read his Publisher's Desk editorial on screen, and each quarter our editor-in-chief serves up a delightful 10-minute video summary of the new issue. Our video camera travels with us now; footage of Hindus and sacred places far and wide is slowly building up on our YouTube channel. The movies are also embedded into the website.
We are also taking advantage of other online channels, including Scribd (see above), where fans can read all the back issues.
On the social network side, we opened a Twitter account, @HinduismToday, and soon you'll be able to find us on Facebook. It's been a real quantum leap!
HINDUISM TODAY NAVIGATOR
For dedicated readers,researchers and those in far off lands who cannot subscribe, our desktop client PDF manager has been a Godsend. Now it is reincarnated as the spectacular Hinduism Today Navigator. The new version continues its original service: it automatically downloads PDFs of the magazine to your computuer, keeps them neatly arranged in a digital library and provides you with an accessible, orderly interface to all past issues. In response to requests for search and readability offline, we now include past articles dating back to 1985 in Web format. A quick and complete search returns a list of articles that you can read as text. When you are online, audio and video features are also available. It is a complete experience without all the Web's usual noise, and it is free. Go to our site, choose "Navigator" from the menus and dive deep into the ocean of Hinduism Today. We hope you enjoy it, and we welcome your feedback!