I got a note from the admin of animasher.com:

That's great! I love that. People will think of and create all kinds of funny animations for their friends and loved ones, and they will have sounds to work with for free. If only we'd have more sounds! :)

Stephan

The site has been down for two days, until i got time to take care of it. A restart of the server fixed it for now. Still don't know exactly what happened but it seems it has been hammered by an overzealous bot.

The site also recently started to get flooded with comment-spam. Like some bot finally found a way to exploit the very old drupal system that pdsounds runs on.

Because of this i revoked the right for anonymous users to post comments without approval. Let's see how this goes.

The site is open wide as a barndoor for any malicous attacks. I'd need a real server-admins help on this to make it more secure.

Greetings,
Stephan

Mayday! Mayday! Where do all these sounds come from?

Since the first week of may pdsounds is suddenly flooding with new sounds, alltogether 60 in a week. Amongst many others there's the honest recording of taking a shower, the street organ we've been waiting for, there's new animal voices, and delicious sounds of tea and wine.

What happened? It's the power of Librivox - pdsound's mother project dedicated to record all public domain literature in spoken audio form. Librivox has set itself to help pdsounds with a burst of its volunteer power. It's a project they call mayhem and they know microphones.
Thank you Cori, for setting this in motion.

This drive is enthralling! Thank all of you for participating. I am looking forward to the next wild three weeks.

Reconstructing pdsounds Help pages

In preparation for "mayhem" i painfully found out that for a long while, how long i don't know, the complete help section of pdsounds was out of order - gone. The pages about what, and how to record, about how to tag sounds etc. were not available to the public.

I have no idea what happened, whether something or someone screwed up the database or anything. But at least it is almost completely restored now. The help is without the former treelike structure now - but for the better of it, it's simpler. So there was something good out of this little breakdown.

Another good thing is that it made me aware to DO MORE BACKUPS and make sure the backups actually work - Rule Number 1 for web administrators. pdsounds is now safely backuped come what will.

Hi,
This is the amount of traffic (in and outgoing to and from the server, measured at the server-providers switch port)

Neat!

2008 Feb - 39 gb
2008 Jan - 40,5 gb
2007 Dez - 42,5 gb
2007 Nov - 59,5 gb (Being in the news on Heise.de)
2007 Okt - 26 gb
2007 Sep - 20,5 gb
2007 Aug - 14,5 gb
2007 Jul - 13 gb
2007 Jun - 26,5 gb
2007 May - 15 gb
2007 Apr - 6,5 gb
2007 Mar - 2,5 gb

* PDSOUND IN THE NEWS *

pdsounds today has been in the news-ticker of one of germanies biggest and most profound computer related magazins C'T.

Here is the News:
http://www.heise.de/ct/07/24/216/

This magazin is read by most of germanies computer professionals and we'll be in this weeks print issue on monday. A good portion of germany might read it.

I am so very happy. This is huge!

Stephan

---

Here is an automated english translation of the news:

I am very happy about the new header looks on the frontpage. The idea is to make the site a little more inviting and to tell what the site is about with pictures. Visitors will get a better clue i hope.

Those are picture that Marcus Kürten, fieldrecordist and heavy sound uploader with a blog http://feldaufnahme.blogspot.com/ took on one of his sound-collecting walks.

Thank you so much for the great pictures, Marcus. They fitted to the layout perfectly in color and style.

Stephan

According to this comment one of the sounds has been used for a documentary. This makes me so very happy.

Noticably more and more people are browsing this site. I am still missing contributers though. I am considering to open the uploading of sounds up to not-logged in users. Perhaps you could comment on that idea.

Added something that drupal calls a "book." Our Help section is a "book." What's so great about it is that everyone can participate in it. Everybody can add and edit pages much like in a wiki.

This will be our collection of guides, questions & answers, rescources to recording, sounds and acoustic.

Also nice is the feature of the printer-friendly version of the book. The book does not consist of single html pages, but is one long complete text that you can print "like a book" without hassle.

Welcome to this collaborative project dedicated to record and collect sounds of everything! Everybody can submit and share their sounds here, in the public domain, in a grand effort to discover the richness of sound.
In order to categorise and cross-reference this big pot of noises, everybody is allowed to tag and thus categorise all sounds.

The hope

I hope that a huge library will build itself out of the volunteer contributions and a snuggly community will come together. I know we will be hearing and experiencing lots of wonderful stuff.

We need you

We need your input! Lots and lots of it. Please write to us, participate in the forum, tell us how the site worked for you, point to problems, give us your suggestions, improvements, your ideas...

But most of all have fun exploring sound,

Stephan