Are you trippy?

So if you just want the website, it's YouTrippy.com

Proudly made with ocPortal.

If you want the story that goes with it:

Trippy: The psychedelic experience is characterized by the perception of aspects of one's mind usually unavailable to ordinary waking consciousness, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ordinary restraints. Psychedelic states are one of the stations on the spectrum of experiences elicited by sensory deprivation as well as by psychedelic substances. on that same spectrum will be found illusions, changes of perception, altered states of awareness, but there are many common themes, and ranges from a sense of connectedness to everything in the immediate vicinity, to a sense of oneness with everything in the universe. Potentially, the range of the drug-induced psychedelic experience goes far beyond drugs.
Some who undertake such experiences come to see them as an ordeal, and mentally overbearing. For many, such experiences come to be seen as personal re-enactments of a hero's journey. Spiritual practices and psychedelic drugs can be used as a means to achieve states of mind in which novel perceptions can arise, unhindered by everyday mental filters and processes. The mental and emotional impact of the experience is positive and enduring for many.

I love music. Meditative. Classic Rock. Experimental. Alternative. Techno. Trance. Psychedelic. I find it all enjoyable. But I will say, there is certain music that hits the soul. For example, give a listen to Within Without you by the Beatles. If you can't hear it, than you must be missing something. Not your fault. Maybe it's me. Maybe I can just hear it.. it's very psychedelic. Ok, I've gone back to Classic Rock because that was certainly one of the major starting points for such music.

So the idea came to me when I was just lying down one night, watching a YouTube video, searching and searching for psychedelic music. Also – ever open up Windows Media Player or iTunes and put on the visualizer with the special effects? You can get lost in it. Especially if your tired.. and right before you fall asleep, your mind just drifting.. surely taken to places. Okay, drugs can enhance the effects too, but I'm not here to encourage or talk about such things. My main concern is the music that is psychedelic and out of this world.

I noticed on YouTube a huge fan base of these kinds of people. And I love YouTube.. I can remember when it first came out and you could upload anything you wanted so long as it was under 10 minutes. But it has grown and it's very useful. Anyways, I noticed the potential for community on there. I also realized how much I was searching YouTube to find psychedelic music and I would keep discovering more and more. Where was this music to be found in one area? And where were the reviews on all these psychedelic bands?

And thus, the idea of YouTrippy.com was born.

So I happened to just come across a website a few days before this idea came to me, and I had been hanging around the chat room and talking to the creator of that site, had this idea - only knew a little bit of HTML and Javascript, mentioned my idea, and he told me about PHP Fusion. From there, things took off. I learned a bit about PHP through trial and error, etc.

Unfortunately, PHP Fusion had quite a bit of error and the video gallery failed to work after scrolling to the second and third page, and despite my huge effort to make small changes to almost rewriting the entire code, it was just far too complex to fix.

I moved on and installed WordPress and then discovered BuddyPress, which supposedly made WordPress into some kind of social network system. After installing just a few plugins, it failed to even load the page and I had to reinstall it. So after reinstalling just WordPress, and installing one or two plugins, without BuddyPress, it did the same exact thing. Done.

So next I moved on to Joomla, thinking I could find what I was looking for. I found a great plugin I wanted, did everything I needed, though it seemed a bit too "commercial." So I installed Joomla and wanted to get some old plugins to work. Apparently there is a plugin that makes old plugins work with the newer version of Joomla. This didn't work. So this basically cancelled out many of the addons that I probably could have used, because the new version of Joomla has addons still being developed to work wtih it. Joomla out.

And in my search, on a Joomla comments page, I saw the words: ocPortal CMS. I read that someone was trying it out and he loved it. I can't remember his name. But… I decided to click the link. And from there, it was becoming love at first sight and I thought I died to find her. Even the clouds in the background let me know that I was probably in Heaven, dead before I even found a great CMS.

I downloaded it and then began to read about the features it contained. And got drawn in. Was this for real?

YouTrippy.com was originally just supposed to be a community-oriented place with a chatroom, forums, personal blogs (that were in their own off-section), video, and wallpaper gallery.

It has not changed too much since switching to ocPortal, but the blog portion has probably become my main part - as with the blog, I review and point out new and existing psychedelic artists and talk about their music. I also encourage others to blog about psychedelic artists and music and those blogs will be displayed on the front page.

Aside from being a blog, there are the forums, the chatroom, the wallpaper gallery, a link exchange, and of course, the point store. It was actually the video gallery that attracted me to ocPortal, which I didn't end up using.

I originally included the video gallery and displayed it on the front page on the side panels, but I felt it was extremely bulky just being there. Perhaps I could have removed it and just had the lists of galleries. But to me, it just didn't seem to fit in right. If I have the motivation and more time, I could make it less bulky – removing the table. Maybe when I become more advanced and learn more about advanced customization of ocPortal, I'll change it. So for now, I have a separate Video CMS (phpDirector) which seems to work more for my needs. If I could do this same thing with the gallery of ocPortal, I certainly would switch back to just use the ocPortal gallery in a heartbeat.

Also, I wanted the forums to be an extension of my blog - for example, a rant or article on psychology - I have a forum for that, a philosophy & religion piece - I have a forum for that. So I could write articles and do certain things and have them listed on the front page, but not the entire article, just a link to it.. so this ocPortal helped me to accomplish as well.

And that is the story of YouTrippy.com.


On a side note. Here is an even more interesting story. I advertised YouTrippy.com for a week on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and my YouTube account with just a link. My rank on Alexa has been jumping like crazy. Since installing ocPortal, which by the way, I feel has amazing SEO skills, it has only skyrocketed. Yet I have been working on my page, but not refreshing too many times, nor do I visit it a hundred times a day. But it's getting massive hits for some reason. I think Alexa is messed up or reporting false results. But I am certainly not complaining, and accept the fate of YouTrippy.com.

When I bought YouTrippy.com – it was in spot 13 million on Alexa.com. I began working on it.. it's rank started to drop, 10, 8, 6… 5.. 3.. and now it's:

YouTrippy is ranked #2,273,258 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings.


Comments and constructive feedback are welcome. Any major suggestions or changes to the site and you will have to rewrite the code and redo it for me.

Also, I am curious: How do I retain members and how do I get people to be more willing to sign up? I get a lot of views, but very few people are actually signing up. So any suggestions or advice on actually building up a member system would be appreciated.

 I know posting more and more content and having people become interested will draw in members - as a new blog is almost never popular. And I know there are still things on my part that I still have to learn.

As I speak, I have just realized how much I was wrong about ocPortal and the video galleries. Wow oh Wow.

I realized the bulkiness of the gallery came from having panels on either side. Removing that so that the panel is on one side and putting the gallery back looks so good.

I am sorry ocPortal! I hope you can forgive me. I am planning to re-instate your video part .

I had a quick peak around, looking good what I saw! Well done!

Quick question for you: how are you posting the youtube vid's in the gallery? I tried briefly but only received an error about file type.

Keep up the good work!

Just copying the entire link from YouTube address bar and pasting it in the URL and hitting submit. Everything works fine from there.

LOL! Must have been your feedback as I just tried it and all good...strange, never worked in the past for me, thanks!

I sure as hope it works! My idea is a video portal site, not an actual site to accept uploaded videos. May as well let (Google) YouTube pay for that.. they can afford it with how much they're making an hour.. hehe.

I'm with a pretty good host for the price. But I only have 1 GB of space. And I'm already 630 MB of 1024 MB - probably because I'm always testing several CMS' at the same time and usually don't delete things that work unless I need to actually do so.


And I just took off the Flow section of the gallery which works much better with the videos. Okay, so no longer needing to bring in an outside CMS… there you go, a site that uses everything ocPortal has to offer.

SoccerDad said

LOL! Must have been your feedback as I just tried it and all good…strange, never worked in the past for me, thanks!

Newish feature .

So thanks Chris, Allen, Robbie, and ocStaff for making the first stable CMS that I was able to .. feel satisfied with.. and feature to the world .

I won't say that it wasn't a rough ride.. ran into bugs along the way, had to redo some stuff, change things, get lots of help, and there is certainly, as you know yourselves.. always work to be done.

Glad I stuck it out though and I'm here to stay.. try and help myself, and ocPortal is now on my link exchange page, so I'll do my best to help when I can. And I'm still here.

Wikipedia: Use (law), an obligation on a person to whom property has been conveyed »

@Xarex: I spent most of the night last night moving my videos from the catalogue system to the video system where I had originally wanted them anyway. I'm a real happy camper now lol.

@Chris: LOL, OCP never ceases to amaze and delight!