The webmaster talks at length about her travails and tribulations on running a successful women centric portal. | Women Blog

Browser extensions or add-ons are bits of software to extend the features of your browser. Firefox browser has probably one of the most prolific numbers of extensions. We use quite a number of these firefox extensions for our daily grind. And we share some of the nifty add-ons here. You may already have a few extensions tooled up in your browser. You can check and modify their behavior all in one place. Just type about:config in the address bar and Firefox will share its internal details now - including the various extensions installed. You can right click on any of the parameter and modify its value.

Though we use WDG HTML Validator for validating our pages, we like to use a quick way to validate the newly built pages right from our browser with a tiny validator.

You head to this URL provided below for this Firefox Extension.

http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/download.html
Allows you to validate with Tiny validator from the status bar.

We list in addition to the above, a few of our favorite extensions below with some information about what they can do:

For the Web developers, this is one of the most useful extensions to have to plod around to tweak the pages.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

That adds a menu and a tool bar with various web developer tools. Right from a spot magnifier which lets you view a part of the page magnified to viewing your page in lesser sized screens is available from the toolbar. Incidentally this extension also has an external page validator.
This versatile add-on features response headers which lets you see the server response details. This is invaluable for checking out the status code of any redirection.

For those inclined to do search engine optimization, the following might be of interest:

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

This extension lets you query information like backlinks, cached and related pages from Google,Yahoo,MSN and Alexa.

You need to check out on the weather ? Try Forecastfox from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/398

Hyperwords is another interesting Firefox extension which lets you do a host of things from its popup menu - “Search, References, Conversion, Translation , Shopping, Blogging, Tagging, Email and more in a single click“. We use the translate mode often as we have associates spread across the world. Simply block the text and you will find a popup menu with an option to translate the blocked text from most European languages (arabic, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinease languages included too) to English or the other way round.

Targetwoman women directory was conceived to complement our main vertical information portal. To summarize our blurb on the home page of the directory – targetwoman directory “lists thousands of high quality websites - carefully chosen by human editors exclusively for women. Combined with the painstakingly written articles from the Women Portal section, we strive hard to offer one of the most rewarding experiences on the Net.”

Initially the idea was to include websites, which will add/throw more light on the information provided in the main body of the article. Alternatively, if we are talking about digital photography, a listing of hand selected sites detailing software, techniques or processes would add to the “rich user” experience we so strive hard to create.

In another instance we have added a site where the owner of the site is selling hand crafted metallic jewelry – tailor made and customized for individual preference in the appropriate section of the directory.

Running a niche – in our case – women directory calls for hard work and tons of patience. These days most stand-alone directories have become staid collection of links. There are literally thousands of such directories dotting the landscape of the Net.

There is profound wisdom in these words – “Creating additional services around your directories sends a very clear message to your site visitors and potential advertisers. It is telling them that you mean business, you understand what they want and you want to provide the most value to your visitors and advertisers.” - http://www.youshouldknow.com/directories/directory-owners-%E2%80%A6-incredible-bright-people-doing-incredible-stupid-things-25.html

There are many kinds of directories now – free directories, paid directories and the new avatar of paid listings in the form of bid-for-position directories. If you look closer, the number of free to list directories has started dwindling down for a reason. The cost of running a high traffic directory is not exactly cheap. Marketing a plain Jane directory and the cost to make them appear in the primary SERP space is very high.

You must carve a niche in your area in order to succeed in the web as in all things in life. So when it came to take stock of the situation, it was decided that we must add more value to the visitors – enrich the user experience and provide value for their time. The first step was to make the directory internals more accessible to the search engines and users alike. No matter how hard you try, URLs like “targetwoman.com/links.php?cat25& …” is not going to make search engines robots and humans alike to sit up and take notice.

So the internal linking structure was modified to look more meaningful – http://dir.targetwoman.com/Aerobics

It was decided to shift the contents to a subdomain for more effective management. In addition, to emphasize the correlation between the information section and the directory section, a corresponding navigational aid had to be stitched together. Hence, the left pane was introduced where articles appropriate to the category appear now.

To alleviate the monotony of the text, we added suitable images on the right, keeping in tune with the regular portal section. The individual page displaying the site in more detail now has more space to show additional information. We are not using the space as of now.

After all the cosmetic makeover of the section and the changes to the internal linking structure was effected we checked out the server stats. We were rewarded with better in-depth crawling of the entire directory section by most of the leading search engines.

Now on to more ambitious changes (to –do list ):

1. Add more detailed information about the site – Contact number and contact details if you are selling a service. We plan to display (edited for clarity and objectivity) information about any product, services you may have. This adds value to the eventual visitor.
2. Use our internal crawler to make the directory more responsive to real time changes. This would eliminate the manual task of weeding out defunct websites.
3. Use some element of popularity to rank the sites when listing them.

Targetwoman - the major genuine information portal for women  has  notched up its 1000 articles  this week. In fact, we have crossed over to about 1005 articles with today’s publication of Antique Furniture article.

We have covered almost all the topics - a woman would be interested in - women health, beauty, apparel, shopping and managing money to name a few. We have spent a fortune  in researching, collating and writing out the articles. All our team members have slogged for day and night to achieve this land mark. I must specifically thank my able colleague - the Webmaster and the Chief Editor without whose complete dedication and sacrifice, this would not have been possible in such a short time.

Many sites, literally thousands of sites have linked to our articles which shows our popularity.

Thank you - our Readers and our loyal visitors. We will toil hard to make your visit genuinely worth your while !

After the holiday season, it is back to the nose at the grinding wheel again…

One look at the number of submissions waiting at the Targetwoman women directory made me cringe at the prospect of wading through literally thousands of them. We have a few volunteer editors who patiently look up the sites in the submitted list and check out whether they are appropriate for inclusion.

Now a bit of statistics is in tune with the subject we are discussing. We have over the past couple of years built up around 6000 links under 10 broad categories and 46 sub categories. This - you would say is paltry addition compared to some of the other directories which add just about the same in about a month.

We have always maintained that we are not looking at the numbers here in our directory. Our ratio of acceptance to submission is about 1:75

Many send us some very complimentary messages ( and not so complimentary messages as well) through the submission form.  I reproduce below some of the subject lines here:

“Very informative and well designed website.”

“Your site was very helpful to me. Thank you. ”

“May God Bless you for the excellent information you offer in your pages ! ”

“Really enjoyed your site. I’ve bookmarked it for future reference. ”

“Your site is very convenient in navigation and has good design ”

Thank you all for the bouquets ( and also for the well intentioned bricks).

I spent almost about 3 hours just to filter out the spam from the list and mark the categories to forward them to appropriate editors. It is not such a pleasant experience for the Volunteer editors to go through grotesquely mangled submissions and as a result, the onus falls on me to sort the list.

Until we come up with a better technological solution to this, the editors or someone has to manually sort the large  volume of submissions.

The definition of fuzzy logic might appear as fuzzy to most, but fuzzy logic forms the basis of control parameters from your washing machine to making movies like Lord of the Rings. We are not going to look too closely at the mathematical fuzzy sets and their operations as developed by Prof. Lofti Zadeh.

What we will see in this blog instead is how the concept of fuzzy logic helps us to submit more effectively to internet directories. To start with, let us chip away the theory bit from this logic and view things in a practical light.

In microprocessor-controlled appliances/applications, you cannot define all variables with precise quantities all the time. You need to allocate certain parameters as dependant on other variables, which will loop back to the earlier ones. Things are not always in black and white – some can come in shades of grey too. Accept this and factor in these in to your overall scheme of things.

That sums up albeit briefly what the fuzzy logic is all about in simple terms. Your washing machine’s microcontroller chip ‘estimates’ the load quantity and calculates the resources (water, detergent and additives if any) based on sensors. It decides the best washing option using fuzzy logic and issues commands to electrical components accordingly.

Fuzzy Logic plays a major role in computer software too. Most of the applications in real world will need to adjust to real world situations. The software must factor in unknown and unpredictable situation in order to be stable. For example, our own Athena health engine uses pattern recognition and uses past accumulated data to arrive at the essence of what the user wants.

Some of the techniques and logic used in many computer algorithms are too fuzzy to be described as anything but fuzzy.

Most webmasters know that getting quality IBLs (inbound links) is essential to make their sites visible in the search engines. To some extent, it also adds to the traffic as you get thematically grouped links under each category. By their own right, many niche directories offer decent amount of targeted traffic to the sites linked.

Most would also know that it takes quite an investment in terms of the time needed to identify, read the guidelines, search for the right category and submit your site. However, always some who look for a quick way out of this. There is no short cut to this process of directory submission. The bottom line is the editor of the directory goes through a painful process of weeding out thousands of spam submissions every day. For a volunteer editor, this unfortunately takes away the time required for editing and adding many useful submissions.

All editors of human edited directories face this problem. Targetwoman directory gets a ton of useless submissions everyday. Unfortunately, the few tens of useful, carefully submitted genuine websites are drowned out in the sea of spam.

A singular solution to the long-suffering editors needed to be found and someone suggested that some fuzzy logic concept is roped in for this. So we decided to implement a bit of this into our ‘add URL’ page.

The whole idea itself is a bit fuzzy. It is all based on our observation of so many thousands of spam submissions.

Point No.1 - A typical spam submitter hardly ever reads the submission guidelines. Many people embed a hidden secret word somewhere in the copy of the submission guideline as is commonly done by some Awards site.

But it takes more time to hunt for the word for the normal genuine submitters.

Point No.2 – A typical spam submitter almost always submits many URLs at the same time. So send the submission page to limbo when the page is loaded with more than one URL.

Point No.3 – A typical spammer types or copies and pastes several lines in the description column. Raise a red flag if such signs are detected for any other column.

Point No.4 – Another trick of a spammer is to type superlatives. Our guidelines strictly forbid using hyperbole or superlatives in the description. Most directories edit out your descriptions if they contain marketing hype. So raise a flag if this point is detected as well.

Point No.5 – Some spammers test the water by submitting gibberish at first. Good thing is check for gibberish.

So we will implement all the above points in the scripts handling the directory submission as soon as we make sense of the logic which is so fuzzy.

I had mentioned yesterday that I had cooked CDs and DVDs just to see the sparkle effects on them. Do NOT try them at home. It could result in serious fire hazard or permanent damage to your microwave oven.

I just wanted to show you here how a DVD looks after sitting inside a microwave for only 5 seconds. The image below shows a normal “raw” uncooked DVD.

Observe the random pattern burnt on the surface and the colorful effects around the burn mark. In fact you will not see any dark tell-tale burnt mark on the DVD. It is all in golden hue.

This heading might raise eyebrows as is expected.  It takes long hours of hard work to run servers and portals. Like most of you, I make do with pizzas and takeaways half the time. But the ubiquitous microwave sitting on the shelves of our office, finally induced me to spruce up some snack when I am famished. Apart from the gallons of coffee it could brew and the standard cup-of-noodles kind of snacks it could so easily deliver, it could do a whole lot of things we never imagined – at least I never even imagined.

The following is an exercise into the world of microwave cooking with a difference – we look at all aspects – technical and practical as well.

Technical View: If you are one of those who think that technology is best left to techies and nerds, skip to the practical section. Let us be practical.

Microwave ovens use magnetrons to generate electromagnetic waves at a frequency of 2450 MHz to induce heat in water, fat and sugar molecules in the food.  Magnetrons require about 600 – 700 Watts of energy to drive them. The various power settings on the control panel actually turns the magnetron on or off as per the settings. Mercifully, the power is fed to the magnetron through a simple transformer and a power diode. Do not try to open up an unit if it fails or out of curiosity. The voltage doubler capacitor may have enough power stored in it to give a lethal shock even after switching off the mains supply. The magnetron lives close to the food chamber and its supply feeds carry enough amperes to make a toast of you.  For your safety as well as all around you, opening up the internals of a microwave oven is best left in the hands of qualified service personnels. 

If the required power were derived from a chopper power supply or to use the computer parlance – switch mode power supply, the resulting harmonics would have inundated the spectrum.  Still microwave ovens emit enough low level power to swamp around the 2450 MHz frequency. Many cordless phones operating out of this frequency spectrum are not too happy sitting around in the same room with a microwave.

Practical View: This method of cooking works because of dielectric heating, which penetrates food deeper, depending upon the composition. As there is little distance between the source of heat and the food, the food is cooked faster. As a corollary, the nutrients are retained better with microwave cooking than through conventional means.Equally, there is a flip side too – the food does not get to that stage of appetizing browning or has the time to develop that delicious golden crust. Meat cooked over a slow fire laced with spices and herbs is always delicious. It is one of the reasons why microwave ovens are more used to reheat and pop corn kernels than regular cooking by many.There is one more use to which microwave ovens can be used about which many people are unaware – zapping microbes so ubiquitous in our kitchen. Our cutting board is easily contaminated with bacteria present in the meat being sliced. You will need to wash them with hot soap water after every use normally. After cleaning, splash water over them and keep them inside microwave for a couple of minutes for zapping the unseen microbes. Table linen and cloth tablemats can be sterilized inside microwaves. However, ensure that there is water on them for real results.