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 worlds 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 worlds largest repositories of Krsna Conscious content on the Web.

Over the ten year span of HareKrsna.coms 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 sites 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 Suns launch, and is expected to exponentially vault well over the million hits per month mark before summers 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 worlds 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 URLs:

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

# # #