While HTML web editors like Dreamweaver, Frontpage and Sharepoint can offer a whole lot of features, free HTML editors too provide great features and are sufficient in most circumstances. What more they are completely free and you do not have to think about licenses or more copies.

1. HTML-Kit

   The HTML Kit free editor is great for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, XHTML and XML editing. There are hundreds of plugins available for HTML Kit. HTML Tidy is one popular plugin for creating standards-compliant web pages. It is also one of the few free editors which support accessibility validating. HTML Kit received a 95% thumps up in Downloads.com which shows its great features and reliability.

   Download: http://www.htmlkit.com/tools/windows/

2. Nvu

   Nvu is another great impressive WYSIWYG editor. Nvu is open source and can work on Windows, Mac and Linux. Try using the editor and you would begin to wonder why on earth they give it free?

   Nvu is a Web Authorizing System which combines web file management with an easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editor. Nvu has advanced XML and CSS support, built-in validator, color coding and full site management.

   Download: http://net2.com/nvu/download.html

3. Aptana Studio

   An open source standalone software based on Eclipse tools platform, it is a great IDE providing integrated language support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and DOM. It also includes embedded development platform and databases for PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python and Jaxer.

   Since Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse, you can plug it in Eclipse itself or any other Eclipse-based IDEs. The software is having good updates, frequent releases and progressing in a steady fast phase.

   Download http://aptana.com/studio/download

4. Sea Monkey

   Sea Monkey is an excellent HTML editor with web-browsing, advanced e-mail and newsgroup clients, IRC chat clients. The all-in-one internet application suite uses much of the same Mozilla source code which powers Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Miro and Camino.

   Download http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

5. KompoZer

   KompoZer was made based on the popular Nvu editor to overcome bug-fixes and slow releases and support for Nvu during its early years. Interestingly, KompoZer failed to satisfy why it was basically created. There have been very less bug fixes and no new releases for a year.

Still, KompoZer is a good WYSIWYG editor with some excellent features.

Download http://kompozer.net/

This article discusses about the boom in Technical Writing and Tips on choosing a good Technical Writing Institute

Technical Writing has been around for almost a decade. However, quite recently, it has acquired widespread attention in India. The number of people interested in becoming a technical writer has increased following many openings for Technical Writers and Technical Documentation Specialists.

The recent technical writing boom in India has sprouted quite a large number of Technical Writing Institutes in India. Bangalore being the IT capital, has Technical Writing Certification Institutes which offer a course from anywhere around Rs 10,000 to Rs 50,000 in a duration of 15 days to 3 months. A seasoned or an experienced Technical Writer may wonder what on earth these institutes teach. Well, if there are students willing to pay, there would be institutes willing to ask for such fees when there is nothing really to learn on technical writing from an institute.

All that is required for becoming a technical writer is:

1. Good or Excellent writing skills
2. Basic Knowledge of Computers and Programming Languages
3. Knowledge of HTML, XML, CSS and Photoshop are an advantage

If you do not have the basic writing skills, it is not recommended to purse a technical writing career.

100% Job Placement

A common statement while enquiring a course center would be, “We provide 100% Job Placements”. Well, that’s a lie.

Kavitha, who recently finished her technical writing course in Technopoint, Bangalore India, mentions with regret, “I was told that they would provide me 100% job placement with a whole lot of other promises. But when I finished my course, there was no information about placements. When I went along with my batch mates and asked them, they mentioned that they will only guide us how to get a job and asked us to update our resumes in Naukri, Times Jobs and Monster. This was disappointing. Don’t we know how to update our resumes in job portals?” She further stated, “In the end, they did not even provide a course completion certificate rather a participation certificate after spending 30,000 rupees. It was a huge mistake I chose this institute“

Crash Courses

Do not join crash courses. You would just end up spending the money in few days instead of months. You would not be able to coupe with the speed and end up confused. Always take time while learning. You need time to learn, practice and prepare to become a technical writer.

Facilities

Check how the center is equipped to provide you all the training that is required. If the center has few computers and the student strength is outnumbered, it’s just not the right technical writing center you need to choose. The center should also have at least the most important softwares:

1. Robohelp
2. Frame Maker
3. Adobe Photoshop
4. Visio

Make sure that they also provide all required study materials. Remember you are shelling out a 5 digit fees and that’s no small a number. You need to get for what you pay.

Syllabus

An ideal technical writing course would start with the basics of writing, the difference between a content writer and a technical writer and basic writing tips, tricks and techniques.

The technical aspects of a syllabus would touch html, xml, css and should spend sufficient hours to make a newbie aware of what they are. The course should end with excellent training on Robo Help, Frame Maker and Visio – the three most common Technical Writing Tools.

If the technical writing institute is also willing to teach you Photoshop and some basic designing and formatting tips it is an added goodie to your course package.

And finally, it’s the English writing skills that finally counts. Technical Writing is just not for everyone. You can enjoy your job and excel in this lucrative career if you have a real passion for writing.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law which criminalizes any production or dissemination of technology, services and devices.

Recently, Google has been spotted removing websites which have been filed under the DMCA as seen below.

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”

To file a notice of infringement to Google, a written communication either by fax or regular post mail is required. The fax or mail should contain valid reasons for the criteria’s listed by Google. The criteria’s in brief include:

1. Sufficient details that the copyright was infringed upon
2. Identify that the material you claim is infringing the work as listed in the first point
3. Your detailed contact information
4. If possible, provide information about the owner or administrator who has allegedly infringed the content
5. Include the statement: “I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”
6. Include statement, “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”
7. Sign the paper
8. Send the details by post or fax to:

Post Address:
Google, Inc.
Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

 Fax:

(650) 963-3255, Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Complaints

For more complete details regarding Google DMCA, please visit this link.

In recent months, Yahoo has been crawling all unnecessary pages which spoil the ranking of the high priority pages in a website. Hence, Yahoo can be seen reporting a much larger amount of indexed pages than what is actually available.
To avoid unnecessary indexing, please read the “Restricting Yahoo Bot using Robots.txt” article.

To remove already indexed pages from Yahoo’s index, you can use wildcards in Yahoo Site Explorer the similar way as you used in Robots.txt

1. Log into your Yahoo Site Explorer Tool using your Yahoo username and password. [Note: You need to authenticate your site first before you can start removing the URLs.] 
2. Once you have authenticated your site, you would see the site listed under “My Sites”
3. Click on the “Explore” button next to your URL.
4. A page with the list of URLs in the site appears
5. Move your mouse over the URL you would like to remove
6. You would find a Delete URL/Path button. Click on the button
7. In the following page, you can specify if you wish to further proceed with deleting the page.
8. You can delete upto 25URLs at one time.
9. If successfully deleted, you would find the URLs listed on the last tab “Actions” found in the left corner

Yahoo bot has been indexing more number of pages than Google bots. This is due to Yahoo indexing even the internal site search results pages. Some webmasters have reported that  Yahoo bot crawls even their drop down menus and also displays their sitemap.xml in its results page which is ridiculous.

Such indexing can deter your rankings and even get listed for spaming. There is an effective way to stop Yahoo from crawling these unnecessary pages and providing the right priorities to your main pages.

Yahoo’s bot is called “Slurp”.

One effective way to stop Yahoo! Slurp to index a page is to provide the “noindex” tag on its header section.

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">

for stopping all search engine bots from indexing the page
  
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="noindex">

to stop Yahoo! Slurp alone from indexing.

These changes would be difficult if your website has dynamic content and especially when your website is too large. It is not practically possible to implement this code inside the pages which you do not want the crawler to index.

Using Wildcards in Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a simple yet effective way to overcome this issue. If your URL is dynamic, or if you wish to block URLs from a certain director, you can do so using wildcards.

For example: http://www.seo-mind.com/?s=robots.txt can be blocked from being indexed by using the “?’ symbol in robots.

Disallow: /? Would block this URL from being indexed.

User-Agent: slurp
Disallow: /cgi-bin*/
Disallow: /*_search*.html
Disallow: /*?sessionid

Similar statements as shown above can be used to block different kinds of URLs from being indexed.

Read more about “How to remove a page already indexed by Yahoo”

Anti-spam filters use various criteria’s and analyze the mail pattern to score a mail as spam. Some of them are listed below:

1. Users tend to click on “report abuse”, “junk mail” or “spam” button instead of “unsubscribe” as they find it more convenient.
2. Frequent newsletters about news, articles and freebies can easily alert spam filters.
3. Subject lines with “trigger” or “hype” words. Example: best, free, secret, money, home business, easy etc.
4. A number of spam filters search an emails for keywords like “Free” in the subject line. “Free” is one of the most common spam search term.
5. Capital letters. This is very important. If the subject line or the content contains sentences in ALL CAPS, it can easily get listed as spam. It is also recommended to use the word ‘Newsletter” in the subject line as it makes it look more genuine to anti-spam filters.
6. Hyperlinks should not be incomplete. If the link is www.seo-mind.com, it should be mentioned with the http:// in the beginning. An URL which is incomplete will give more points to spam filters for blocking your email.
7. Striking colors like Blue, Red and Magenta will also alert the spam filters. It is good to use more of white as background and less of other colors. If a color is necessary, it can be given as a background image.
8. Most spam emails are less than 20k in size. If we have our emails slightly above the average spam e-mail size, it would be good.

Effects of being listed as Spam:

 Being listed as spam should be considered serious. If any emails from your domain is listed as spam, then there are more possiblities that most of your emails directly land in the junk mail box. You can contact the respective spam protection team with proof for removing you from the blacklist.

1. Online email sites like AOL, Gmail or MSN can act on a domain or an IP even if it gets few mails from a domain or an IP being marked as spam. This would mean, even a new registration email would not be received by the user or it would land directly in the spam box.
2. If these sites find the spam level to be severe, some of them share the data with other servers leading to many mail servers blocking the indicted domain or the IP address. This is because, most mail servers opt for a third-party anti-spam filter.
3. If a web server which also provides internet search [ex: Google, MSN, Yahoo] lists a website for spamming, it can in turn remove if from its search listing or lower its rankings.

Precautions

1. Do not send unsolicited mails
2. Never get an email list which does not contain your clients for bulk mailing
3. Send a mail to a recipient asking for confirmation if they need newsletters after they register or at the time of registering
4. Do not place promotional or trigger words. Avoid words described above.
5. Never use capital letters. Especially in the subject line.
6. Mention that it is a newsletter in the subject line.
7. Do not send mails way too often. Some blogs or news websites send mails almost every day. This can irritate the email recipient and make them click on the “spam” button.
8. Try to keep the email size between 20 – 50k.
9. Provide complete URLs.
10. Do not send mails from a free email service or a free email id.

The above precautions can help you get away with most of the anti-spam filters.

Christmas season is obviously the highest revenue earner. Customers start searching for gifts and personal purchases many months before Christmas arrives. If you have an e-commerce website and would like to make good use of this season, you should get your basics right now.

Holiday Marketing Plan

Most of the online sellers know where the source of revenue is and which pays more. It’s just that they do not have a clear marketing plan which targets those areas. A well planned start is much closer to the finishing line. To succeed you need to plan first. Take down a pen and paper and put your thoughts on it.

1. Who are your clients?
2. What would you do to reach your clients?
3. Which products yielded you the maximum profits last year?
4. Which product is the most selling?
5. Do you have all features and tools to help customers buy these products on your website?
6. How will you handle out-of-stock and fast-delivery issues? Do you have a backup?

Once you find out the answers for such questions, you would obviously land in a marketing plan. You would know where you are and what you need to do to climb the peak. The climb would definitely be difficult, but the excitement at the top is invaluable.

Analyze your Plan

Now that you have a plan, are you sure that the plan would succeed. Today, not just one, but a number of strategies and plans are required to work simultaneously to succeed. These combinations of strategies and plans makes it a huger structure and tougher to correlate to. One helps the success of other.

To analyze your plan:

Online Stats

Use online statistics to check if your competitors have implemented or are following similar plans that you have worked on.
How successful is the plan on their websites?
What is the percentage of competitor growth?
Use tools like Google Adwords to check the popularity of your product keywords.

Implementation

Now that you have found out the best route to success, start implementing them on the site. The sooner you implement, the faster you would reap results for the holiday season. Always remember that there are millions of potential customers online. However, there are huge number of competitors too who are experienced players.

Holiday Offers

Holiday offers are a great way to promote your products. A good offer can even convert a casual onlooker to become one of your buyers. Offers attract and lure an onlooker. Offers on electronic products can be a great way to increase your product sales.

Use pay-per-click programs to advertise about your offers on third party websites. The advertisements when clicked should land a person directly on the product page and not the home page.

Geographic Sales

If you could deliver the products only in the United States and Canada, its good you focus these two areas instead of the entire world. If it is just a state, set the geographic location on search engines using their webmaster tools.

Holiday Landing Pages

Create or modify your existing landing pages for Holidays. Good images and discounts can increase your sales to a greater extent. Some e-commerce websites change the entire look of the website during the holiday season.

Shipping

Shipping is one major eye-catcher which can make the deal. Various web analytical tools have revealed that many customers leave the online transaction process when they see that the shipping cost is being added to the product cost. This is unpleasing to most buyers and they end up calculating the difference it would make buying online and buying it in a shop. If the product is wide spread and shops sell it for few more dollars, most customers would prefer to buy it in a shop as they have the freedom to see it and check it before purchasing it.

Once these are planned and organized, you are all set to face the holiday season. All the best on your holiday sales!

There are so many SEO conferences happening lately. You see advertisements about conferences in various websites. They are hugely promoted. Is it any good going for one of these conferences?

Most webmasters or SEO analysts feel these conferences are no good as they keep speaking the issues already known. No additional knowledge gain. The speakers try to come up with an insight from a different angle. Well, how much would that be helpful? Being that most of these conferences are costly to even attend.

Few possible reasons you could go for a search engine conference would be:

1. Learn Something New: Not all the information spoken are known facts. Good SEO conferences do help understand or learn new search engine strategies.
2. Industry Networking: You end up meeting a large number of attendees who are from the same field. They do the same work you do. These people would definitely be useful. You end up making few of them friends and would turn out planning a large business collaboration or at least discussion for reciprocal links or one way links.
3. If you are the one who is conducting the conference, well, you have to go. You have put in a lot of money or probability would have earned a lot with good sponsors. You at least have to attend it and know how it goes so you can make more money next time. Though this sounds ridiculous, most of the conferences are organized mainly for this reason. It’s more of a business trick rather than an educational platform.

If you already have enough friends who are into blogging or into online small business, the best way is to sit along with them and discuss and share plans, projects and ideas among yourself.

One way paid links with nofollow tag would not be successful if your site does not drive enough traffic. Recent discussions, polls and surveys by websites reveal that website owners would not be interested in having a link on your site with a nofollow tag if they would not yield much benefit.

There are three main reasons one would like to link to your website:
1. The traffic/visibility they would obtain by having a link on your website
2. A link on a high PR page can help increase SERP to a certain extent
3. Increasing external links

If you would be placing a nofollow tag to the link that you sell, then two of the three main reasons become invalid.

The largest search engine Google has created the nofollow tag and we need to follow it. Most of the sites get 50% - 70% of the traffic from Google. With a nofollow tag, you would be stopping the PR from passing on to the linked page and also prevent Google from recognizing it as an external link.

With just one reason remaining, an interested visitor would now look at the amount of traffic your site receives. Many blog and forum owners make a mistake here. They quote huge prices for an ad which is no where related to the number of hits the website receives every month. A advertiser would be at least aware that he/she has to check how productive that link would be before they pay you.

The best strategy would be to give out paid links with nofollow only on top performing pages.. You need to have some convincing figures on Alexa or a popular traffic analyzing tool before you ever plan to provide the service.

It was probably the April of 1974. Bangalore was getting warm and  Gulmohars were blooming at the IISc campus. I was the only girl in my postgraduate department and was staying at the ladies’ hostel. Other girls were pursuing research in different departments of Science.
I was looking forward to going abroad to complete a doctorate in  Computer science. I had been offered scholarships from Universities in the US . I had not thought of taking up a job in India …

One day, while on the way to my hostel from our lecture-hall complex, I Saw an advertisement on the notice board. It was a standard job-requirement notice from the famous automobile company Telco (now Tata Motors). It stated that the company required young, bright engineers, hardworking and with an excellent academic background, etc.

At the bottom was a small line: “Lady candidates need not apply.”

I read it and was very upset. For the first time in my life I was up against gender discrimination.

Though I was not keen on taking up the job, I saw it as a challenge. I Had done extremely well in academics, better than most of my male peers. Little did I know then that in real life academic excellence is not enough to be successful.

After reading the notice I went fuming to my room. I decided to inform The topmost person in Telco’s management about the injustice the company was perpetrating. I got a postcard and started to write, but there was a problem: I did not know who headed Telco.

I thought it must be one of the Tatas. I knew JRD Tata was the head of The Tata Group; I had seen his pictures in newspapers (actually, Sumant Moolgaokar was the company’s chairman then). I took the card, addressed It to JRD and started writing. To this day I remember clearly what I wrote.
 
“The great Tatas have always been pioneers. They are the people who Started the basic infrastructure industries in India , such as iron and steel, chemicals, textiles and locomotives. They have cared for higher Education in India since 1900 and they were responsible for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science. Fortunately, I study there. But I am surprised how a company such as Telco is discriminating on the basis of gender.”

I posted the letter and forgot about it. Less than 10 days later, I received a telegram stating that I had to appear for an interview at

Telco’s Pune facility at the company’s expense. I was taken aback by the telegram. My hostel mate told me I should use the opportunity to go to Pune free of cost and buy them the famous Pune saris for cheap! I collected Rs 30 each from everyone who wanted a sari. When I look back, I feel like laughing at the reasons for my going, but back then they seemed good enough to make the trip.

It was my first visit to Pune and I immediately fell in love with the city.

To this day it remains dear to me. I feel as much at home in Pune as I do in Hubli, my hometown. The place changed my life in so many ways. As directed, I went to Telco’s Pimpri office for the interview.

There were six people on the panel and I realised then that this was serious business.

“This is the girl who wrote to JRD,” I heard somebody whisper as soon as  I entered the room. By then I knew for sure that I would not get the job.  The realisation abolished all fear from my mind, so I was rather cool while the interview was being conducted.

Even before the interview started, I reckoned the panel was biased, so I told them, rather impolitely, “I hope this is only a technical  interview.”

They were taken aback by my rudeness, and even today I am ashamed about  My  attitude. The panel asked me technical questions and I answered all of them.

Then an elderly gentleman with an affectionate voice told me, “Do you Know why we said lady candidates need not apply? The reason is that we have never employed any ladies on the shop floor. This is not a co-ed college;  this is a factory. When it comes to academics, you are a first ranker throughout. We appreciate that, but people like you should work in research  laboratories.”

I was a young girl from small-town Hubli. My world had been a limited place.

I did not know the ways of large corporate houses and their difficulties, so I answered, “But you must start somewhere, otherwise no woman will ever be able to work in your factories.”

Finally, after a long interview, I was told I had been successful. So this was what the future had in store for me. Never had I thought I would take up a job in Pune. I met a shy young man from Karnataka there, we became good friends and we got married.

It was only after joining Telco that I realized who JRD was: the Uncrowned king of Indian industry. Now I was scared, but I did not get to meet him till I was transferred to Bombay … One day I had to show some reports to Mr Moolgaokar, our chairman, who we all knew as SM. I was in his office on the first floor of Bombay House (the Tata headquarters) when, suddenly JRD walked in. That was the first time I saw “appro JRD”. Appro means “our” in Gujarati. This was the affectionate term by which people at Bombay House called him.

I was feeling very nervous, remembering my postcard episode. SM tntroduced me nicely, “Jeh (that’s what his close associates called him), this Young woman is an engineer and that too a postgraduate.

She is the first woman to work on the Telco shop floor.” JRD looked at me … I was praying he would not ask me any questions about my interview (or the postcard that preceded it). Read More »