Updated April 6th 2018

by Justin Deschamps,

Hello Stillness readers and supporters! Justin here, Founder of Stillness in the Storm.

As you are likely aware, we have transitioned to our new platform: WordPress. We were using Blogger but this was problematic for several reasons. We, here at Stillness, know that any change to a site can be unsettling or cause confusion. In this update, I will inform you as to what these changes mean and some things you need to be aware of in order to keep receiving updates and accessing the site. I’ll also share some solutions to the problems that this transition has created as well as what the future for Stillness holds.

These changes were carefully considered and made with you, the audience, in mind. We hope that you can adapt to the new site with ease. And we encourage feedback to continue to make this site the best it can be.

Here’s an overview of what this article covers.

• What The Change Means For You
• Revenue and Advertisements
• Change to the RSS feed
• Change to the Newsletter (April 6th 2018)
• Old URL Redirect Problem
• Translate Site Into Other Languages
• Archived Content
• Menus
• Chrome and Internet Explorer Browser Problems (April 6th 2018)
• The Future

Problems with the site: If you are having problems with accessing or viewing the site, please fill out this questionnaire so we can determine what the issue is. In most cases the problems are caused by local issues on your computer or how you are accessing the site. And as such, there might be a few things we can suggest to improve your user experience.

Why The Change And What This Means For You

This change took place for several reasons.

Blogger is a rather outdated platform that presented many logistical problems for us. Posting content was challenging. The HTML editor required a lot of time and had constant formatting problems. Entering content was laborious. We realized that the look and feel of the Blogger site did not have what we needed, so we had to move forward toward a better horizon that offered the site additional functionality and a more professional experience. We have a lot of plans for offering greater content, tools, and community support in the Stillness in the Storm project umbrella, and Blogger wasn’t able to handle the demands.

What to Expect From WordPress

The site you have come to know and love will remain largely the same. The layout was altered slightly in that the right-hand sidebar is now for ads. If you’re looking for the features from the old site, check out the left-hand sidebar.

Secure Site

We are pleased to announce that we are now on a very fast and secure server, independent of Google!

As many of you know, there is a censorship purge of alternative media sites taking place at this time, and Stillness was flagged as a “fake news” site at the end of 2016. In some respects, we’re proud of such a label, as what the mainstream media labels as fake news is usually more valid and truthful than the media coming from “official” sources. However, there was a profound risk that Google (who owns Blogger) could have decided at any time to shutdown Stillness in the Storm. The change to an independent server shields us from this risk, for now. As a community, we still have to rally together to face the media giants and their hidden overlords that seek to suppress the alternative media and the truths that we as a people need to grow beyond the limits of the past.

Whereas we had security before, we now have even more security. We are now using secure socket layer or SSL for the website, which means the http prefix of the url has changed to https.

SSL allows sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and login credentials to be transmitted securely. Normally, data sent between browsers and web servers is sent in plain text—leaving you vulnerable to eavesdropping. If an attacker is able to intercept all data being sent between a browser and a web server, they can see and use that information. (source)

This change won’t affect how you use the site, but it will improve security in general. Furthermore, this is essential for future developments we intend to offer once those projects come online.

Revenue and Advertisements

The main ad service on Stillness changed from a pay-per-click service to a pay-per-view service. These ads appear on the top, bottom and right-hand side. However, there are still ads on the left-hand side that are pay-per-click.

We would love not to have advertisements at all on the site, but we need the revenue from ads to pay for server space, website costs, and general living expenses.

Although ads can be somewhat distracting, the new ad service requires nothing but tolerance on your part. Just simply being on the site reading articles or watching videos counts as a “view,” called an impression, which generates revenue for us. If you use an adblocker, we completely understand. We ask that you to consider removing it for this site as this would help us generate the revenue we need to stay afloat, as well as helping us fund future projects. Otherwise, consider making a small monthly donation via Paypal, Patreon or Cryptocurrencies.

For the price of a meal at a restaurant, about $20 a month, or more, you can support our work and all that we have coming in the future for Stillness.

Running Stillness is a full-time job, more like two full-time jobs—and that’s just for me as the CEO. Teresa and Sterling also generously provide their energy to what we’re building here, a small budding community of active players on the world stage of evolving consciousness.

Without ad revenue, and your support in general, we can’t do what we do here.

We plan on offering more original and in-depth content, especially now that production demands on posting content have been reduced considerably by using WordPress. The more revenue that Stillness generates the more work to expand consciousness, world healing, and research we can do. Every penny counts and is used for this purpose.

One day, we hope to pay other researchers, truth seekers, and those looking to be employed by a conscious employer—all of which requires money. So while we don’t do what we do at Stillness for money and profits, the money we receive in the way of support or ad revenue goes directly to what we call the Great Work—the slow and steady improvement of all life on earth and beyond.

Change to the RSS feed

For those who use RSS services to receive updates from your preferred news sites and blogs, you’ll want to read this.

If you’re not sure what an RSS service is, it is a one-stop-shop style aggregation tool for following websites. Instead of having to manually check the sites you love, you can have all the updates posted in one place.

I have been using an RSS service since I began my awakening in 2010, using Feedly. It’s a big time saver for me, and it’s the primary way I stay up to date on all the various content sources I follow. There’s even a way to add your favorite YouTube channels to your RSS service.

We were using Google to provide RSS updates in the past. But now that we are on WordPress that has changed. This means that the subscription you had on your RSS reader for Stillness in the Storm no longer works.

You will need to re-subscribe using the new RSS link: https://stillnessinthestorm.com/feed/ . We’re still looking to find a solution for redirecting the old feed traffic to the new feed.

How to re-subscribe to the new Stillness RSS feed?

Go into your RSS reader, and in the search for new content or follow a new website field, paste in the link (https://stillnessinthestorm.com/feed/). The new feed should populate with the new feed that will need to be added to your list.

Change to the Newsletter

For those who have been getting updates from our daily email newsletter, you’ll want to read this.

We were using Feedburner to collect and send email updates to our readers, once a day at around 1 pm EST. But with the move to WordPress, this feature stopped working. In a way, this is a good thing because, as was mentioned before, Google owns Feedburner and there was a risk that the service could get pulled at any time due to censorship.

We have moved to Mailchimp, a somewhat expensive service with a lot more security, features, and functionality.

The good news is that we’ll have greater control and security for those who submit emails to us for the newsletter. The bad news is that your email provider might mistake the Stillness newsletter for spam.

How can I make sure I receive my Stillness newsletter?

The newsletter comes from the [email protected] email. Be sure to add this to your whitelist—which is the Safe Sender list your email service maintains to ensure the content ends up in your inbox. In other words, if you have been a long time subscriber to Stillness newsletters, and haven’t been receiving them since March 12th, 2018 (when we made the migration), adding the [email protected] email to the whitelist will tell your service to put the newsletter in the inbox, where you can see it. 

Not every email service is the same, but in general you need to go into your settings and look for the whitelist or safe sender list. You can also check your spam folder, and if the newsletter is there, mark it as not spam. Here is a tutorial on how to add email senders to your safe list.

April 6th 2018: We are currently working to add images back into the newsletter. The old service did this automatically. As of today, images should appear in the newsletter, Please let us know if you have any other feedback ([email protected]).

The Old URL: sitsshow.blogspot.com Redirect Problem and Solution

The old blogspot URL for Stillness (sitsshow.blogspot.com) is no longer working efficiently to redirect to the new URL: stillnessinthestorm.com. Previously, when we moved from the blogspot to the stillnessinthestorm.com URL in May of 2017, Blogger was still hosting the site, which means it would automatically redirect sitsshow.blogspot.com URLs to stillnessinthestorm.com URLs. But now this is no longer the case.

What this means is that if you have bookmarked any posts using the blogspot URL you’ll have to change it to stillnessinthestorm.com or make an additional click to access Stillness. The additional step via a redirect page looks like this:

Although this can be somewhat annoying, you can get to Stillness by clicking “yes.”

As a long-term solution, we suggest you go into your bookmarks and change the URL to https://stillnessinthestorm.com/ .

If you have other Stillness posts bookmarked with the old blogspot address, you can still get to them but you’ll need to go through the blogger redirect page, shown in the screenshot above. We suggest you go to those favorite Stillness posts via the redirect page and then bookmark it again using the new stillnessinthestorm.com URL.

If you use a search bar to get to Stillness by searching for “sitsshow” you can still find the website, but we suggest searching for Stillness in the Storm instead.

Translate Site Into Other Languages

You can use the widget at the bottom left of every page to translate the site into your prefered language, see the following screenshot:

Future Changes, Updates, and Developments

Archived Content

The archive dropdown from the old Blogger

site stopped working when we moved to WordPress.

Previously, you could have clicked on a month and scrolled through the posts for that month. But when the migration to WordPress happened, this featured started listing an entire year’s worth of content, which was cumbersome and unmanageable. We are currently looking for a solution and will likely create a standalone page for navigating through older Stillness content with much greater ease and a user-friendly experience.

Menus

The menus at the top of the Stillness site

have evolved since we began this project in 2013. We’re currently going through a reorganization of the Category and Tagging system, which will make sorting content on stillness by selecting certain categories easier.

In the future, almost all of the menus, and pages linked to them, will be revamped to some degree, especially the Start Here, Our Story, About Us, Media, and Social Media pages.

We understand that any change can be confusing, so we’re working to ensure that the essential functions of these pages remain the same along with adding improvements.

Chrome and Internet Explorer Problems

April 6th 2018: According to some users, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer can cause trouble with accessing the site.

It should be noted that these seem to be isolated issues, not across all users. This likely occurs due to large cache sizes of those browsers and the tendency of them to take up a lot of computer resources, especially on older computers.

Also, if you use a lot of plugins or toolbars, this can slow down your browser and reduce access to the site.

The best practice to solve this problem would be to clear the browser cache or update the browser. Also be sure to restart your computer regularly (at least once a day).

You can also try other browsers like FireFox, Safari, Brave, and so on. According to most users who experience this problem, using Firefox seems to be a good work solution.

We’re currently investigating to see if there is anything we can do on our end (on the server) to solve this problem.

The Future of Stillness

As some of you know, the original content, such as videos, articles, and webinars has not been frequent over the past year.

The move from Blogger to WordPress was a monumental task that has gone through several phases and changes to the team helping me implement them. For most of the time Stillness has been alive, it was run by myself as a solo enterprise, especially after losing my partner and co-founder Julian Robles in 2015. This project has consumed almost every waking moment of my life. But in July of last year, a dear friend was hired with the help of an investor that provided Stillness with the funds needed to reorganize Stillness, which had grown far larger than I could personally manage. During this period of planning for the reorganization, I also needed to keep the work of Stillness going while trying to spend time developing the migration to WordPress project, in addition to mapping what the new features of the site will do. The investor had to withdraw their funding in December 2017, and as a result, we’ve been moving forward on our own steam since then, which of course draws on your support and ad revenue.

I met Teresa Yanaros and Sterling Nicole Bennet at Contact in the Desert 2017. They began working with me on Stillness more closely as of September 2017, and without their efforts, none of this would have been possible.

I’ve been hinting about the future of Stillness for the past year or so. And although I don’t like to speak on projects I can’t guarantee in some specified period of time, I am excited by what the future holds!

For the Stillness in the Storm site, we plan on providing community tools to help truth seekers and world healers network with each other, share research, empower themselves with solutions, and brainstorm about how to make our world a better place. These tools will range from online venues, community-driven events, and lawful tools to empower those willing to do the work with incredible protections, as well as the essential knowledge to live an honorable life and help make the world a better place simply by being a conscious co-creator with others.

Modern Masters is a phenomenal project with a focus on creating an online platform for educating seekers on all manner of things, such as self-mastery, consciousness upliftment, practical solutions, and much more. Teresa and I met with them at Conscious Life Expo 2018 and they gallantly provided amazing support for the migration of Stillness to WordPress. We plan on working closely with them to provide you and the world with the knowledge and wisdom we all need to do the Great Work for ourselves and others.

For myself, I have been working tirelessly for years maintaining everything that this site is, while also doing research and expanding my own knowledge. I have learned a great deal over the years and have been fortunate enough to make powerful alliances with some fellow world healers who remain behind the scenes at the moment. There is still a lot of work to be done to finish the revamp of this site and bring it up to date, but now that we are on WordPress, I will have more time to generate original content, such as writing articles, producing videos, hosting webinars, speaking at conferences, and in time, writing my first book. My focus, as ever, has been to gain as much key knowledge and understanding as I can, and share this with the world so all of us can work together to improve our personal lives and the planet. To be sure, I am excited to begin pouring more of this knowledge out into the public arena, which has grown complete and replete over the years. And of course, I am eager to work with and hear from all of you who are my comrades in this Great Work—because as I love to say, we are all in this together.

Final Thoughts

I know that things have shifted quite a bit since Stillness began. There are some very exciting things on the horizon for this site and humanity. I am honored to play a part in this world healing work, along with all of you who have heard the call and made your own strides up the mountain of self-discovery and resulting service to others.

We are all unique aspects of the universe with a special storehouse of wisdom, gathered over years of life. Together, we can come together to bring healing to the suffering, knowledge to the seekers, and empowerment to the downtrodden, not with egoness but with humility. While I know I have much knowledge to share, all I have learned is only a grain of sand on the shores of the human collective—I am continuously humbled by what others share with me and what I know I can still learn. Each of you with your unique wisdom continues to amaze, inspire, and teach me. I hope that those who hear the call for unity and harmony, for love, truth, and justice, will join with me in whatever way they can for this Great Work we each have a chance to take part in. Whether that work is in the Stillness in the Storm project or elsewhere, I know that through the willingness and dedication we each have to offer, all things that are possible can be done—for the good of all.

Much love,

 – Justin

The preceding is a Stillness in the Storm original creation. Please share freely. 

About The Author

Justin Deschamps has been a truth seeker all his life, studying physics, psychology, law, philosophy, and spirituality, and working to weave these seemingly separate bodies of information into a holistic tapestry of ever expanding knowledge. Justin is a student of all and a teacher to some, sharing what he has discovered with those who are ready and willing to take responsibility for making the world a better place. The goal of his work is to help himself and others become better truth-seekers, and in doing so, form a community of holistically minded individuals capable of creating world healing projects for the benefit of all life—what has been called The Great Work. Check out his project Stillness in the Storm to find some of his work. Follow on Twitter @sitsshow, Facebook Stillness in the Storm, and minds.com.

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Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Do you think this article needs a correction or update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at [email protected] with the error, headline and url. Thank you for reading.

March 23rd, 2018:  A translation widget update was added. And grammar and spelling corrections were made to this article.