Monday, December 08, 2003

Countrymen...

Greetings to you all...

As I refer to my bookmarks for the last E-lore of 2003, I end up with sites mostly related to Web Design or Office Management. Anyway lets proceed with E- Lore

BUSINESS WITH BUTTONS : For those people, who would like to create interesting buttons, logos and flashy texts, TomaWeb is a very simple yet effective one. The main advantage of this site is its vastness and variety in fonts. And to top it all, its free without any catches or logins. No surprise that there have been more than a million buttons created with this site in the past six months.
Cool Text is another useful application of this kind. Cool Text is one of the sites that had given satisfactory and free service to Webmasters for long thereby having rendered nearly 9 crore logos. Cool Text is indeed cool if you are looking for Logos with good textres and at good speed. A site much better than the above said two is FreeLogoMakers. If you are a little patient and prepared to understand its complications, Free Logo makers would then be your ultimate stop.It is another wonderful website for this purpose, the USP being its benevolent list of backgrounds.

FEEL FANTASTIC...FEED FREE : If you are an Indian or a person from South East Asia, you should have known a bit or two about the horrible hunger deaths. For those people, who are concerned but dont have the time for it, you too can contibute with bhookh.com. Just make a click on their button and you would have sponsored a cup of staple food for an hungry Indian. Special Kudos to the man behind Bhookh, Vikas Sutaria. Please visit this site...Never has one click of yours mattered a lot!

TOOLS FOR SCHOOLS : Gone are the days, where schools were a place for Jacks with all works and no plays. Today much emphasis is made on inducing innovations and interactions whilst teaching amd this starts from the KG Levels. The School Time Directory is a wonderful collection of resources that faciliate free online understanding of the concepts with the help of multimedia, games and quizzes. Kewl for Kids... relief for parents and teachers...

ADDRESS & ANSWERS : With the Internet expanding our circle of contacts every day, remembering our contacts and their vital data becomes a Hereculean Task. Computer Address Books are perhaps the only answer to this problem and as an answer to our Address Books, Biz Office provides a lovely listing of various free downloadable address books, Yours truly has found the services of Free Byte's Custom Address Book cool, customisable and compact.

CALENDAR CRAZY : "Nothing is more precious than time" is a saying familiar to all of us. If you want to know some precious facts about time and get to know some interesting facts and figures, do access Calendar Home. It also offers customised Calendars(Not Free) apart from a host of other services like This Day in History, Calendar Convertor etc. The websites Calendar Zone and Calendopaedia offer a huge lot of information about Calendars and dates. I would also suggest timeanddate.com, another impressive site for Calendars and Time. In this stead, if you are interested to know the current time and date at a particular country, simply login to Time Ticker

WEBMASTER'S WORKSHOP: Webmasters would always love to have a dig for free tools and if you havent, why dont you try Freeware Home and Build Free, two fascinating sites in thier own right. I definetely asssure you that a visit to these sites would be worthwhile, especially the latter. A paradise for those netizens who have to be free.

BLOOD BONDS : If I havent talked to you about it yet, Please visit www.indianblooddonors.com. It is a noble site by Mr.Poacha aimed at avoiding any Indian death for the want of blood. The site has undergone a lot of upgrades and has become only better in its job of forming a Bond of Billion Indians for Blood.

Thats my last entries for 2003. Meet u all in 2004, with a lot of exciting E-lores.

Urs always
Rathnavel
www.reavan.cjb.net



Monday, November 03, 2003

Friends, Foreigners and Countrymen

For those of you, to whom me pursuing Masters in Environmental Engineering may be news or as old as fuse, I had my demanding project and examination schedule standing between me and carefree explorations.Yet there were a few noteable things in this month as well, which form the E-Lore of this month.

During the documentation of my thesis work, I was literally struck at one particular point. I had to describe the surroundings by mentioning the group of pigs. We normally refer animal group by names like "army of ants", "herd of elephants" etc. However my knowledge on the group name of pigs was found wanting and if not for the help of Stalkings Animal Group Names Listing. It provides the list for a wide variety of animals.

One more thing that held my attention during my project documentation was the usage of Roman Numbers. Roman Numbers have come into good use nowadays with more emphasis on Numbering and indexing in documents. In this regard, I deem the site Nova Roma - Roman Numerals a very useful one for computing the Roman equivalent for any number and for a good introduction to the roman numerals.With this regard, I would also recommend the site Lee Calculator

From numbers to words, let me introduce this lovely e-mail service A-word-A-Day. For all of us who want to enunciate or enhance our English Vocabulary, this site is indeed a kewl tool. If sends you one unusual english word to your e-mail every day alongwith its meaning, usage, prounonciation and historical facts associated with the particular word. And its AWAD Issue that feautures the feedbacks of the readers sharing thier experience of using the particular word, is a literary delight. Definetely a kewl site for those on hunt for exquisite English.

It is not enough that you know words, you should put them into use and display your verbal might. One way of putting your verbal histronics into action is PUBLIC SPEAKING.

There are a lot of sites that offer essential training on this aspect and you can find them for yourselves by typing "Public Speaking" in Google. Off all these, I find the site "Art of Speaking" by Mahavir Mahonot very comprehensive and useful. I am also a fan of the sister sites SpeechTips and SpeechSuccess, which provide us with tailor made speeches for all occassions apart from providing valuable tips and clearing misconceptions. Yours truly has also shared his ideas of PublicSpeaking at Mouthshut.com through his review "Let me KISS(Keep it Short and Simple)".

With our development touching new scales, public speaking has become a very commonplace activity and I strongly suggest every netizen gets him/her self trained in this area. The rapid development of our society has also made the professional speakers switch over from Public Speaking to Presentation Skills. With the easy and ample availability of technology, speeches have given way to(in an truly optimistic sense "evolved to") Presentations. "Presentation" though closely related to "Speech" has one huge difference over the former, there is equal or I shall say more emphasis on "planning", when compared to the actual "delivering".

In this background, it would better for ourselves to emphasise on good presentations as well and you have to bookmark "Virtual Presentation Assistant", a great guide for equipping oneselves with Presentation Skills. As a trainer, I can affirm that this site is one of the best sites, I have ever come accross. The links to Presentation Skills offered by KU Medical Centre and Business Connection are definetely worth a click.

One more way to express your verbal powers is through Writing. The Internet gives us a lot of oppurtunities to hone your writing skills. You may start by writing feedbacks and gradually post in forums,write reviews, try poetry, get into blogging and ultimately find yourself writing Essays/ Articles for various websites and magazines. For budding and amateur writers, E- Writers Place, Writers Digest, Writing Resources Center are all good patrons.

Before I conclude this November Blog, let me remember a few sites for you

(1)GoodHit.com, which gives a good list of various weblinks associated with India,
(2)Webattack.com, a website that offers a variety of novel freeware and shareware
(3)HPs Everyday Home Fun, which provides projects and tips to make a house a home

And thats for good old November, meet u all in the last month of 2003

Urs always
Rathnavel
www.reavan.cjb.net

Sunday, October 05, 2003

Friends, Foreigners and Countrymen

Hope you have a October of Oppurtunities. And as I look back on my web experiences in September, I should say I browsed a lot , but my memory has slightly let me down with a few sites. Neverthless let me putforth the E-LORE of the month.

I had discussed with you the plight of the subdomain services offered by zdos.com, and also recommended you www.cjb.net and www.webalias.com. In that regard, I had come across a Comprehensive Compilation of Free Subdomain Providers/URL Redirecters done wonderfully by freecenter.com. I think that would be very useful for poor netizens like me. Speaking of poor netizens, I also believe that the compilation on free web space providers by Free Webmaster Tools is also useful bookmark. Free WebHosts is another great site for info on free web hosts.

One of my prominent tenets has been my absent mindedness. You can trust upon me to remember to greet a friend throughout the year, and forget it exactly on his birthday. To tackle the issue, I had always kept a small pocket diary of birthdays and after being converted into a netizen, I employ the free reminder services. I had been using diarysmart.com suggested by my good friend Jude Renil, which has gone on hibernation nowadays. I also came accross the website BirthdayAlarm, but I am not able to set the alarms. I also set sight upon another service called bigdates.com, which I am yet to try out. I believe that Yahoo, Excite and Lycos also provide the service to their subscribers. Another provider E-Cards has shut down it's free service and would be providing premium services only. However the best of the lot is free-minder.com, which has provided my flawless and timely service for more than 2 years. I should thank TheFreeSite for introducing me to this website.

September 27 is an important date in the history of India. It is the birthday of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, one of India's best patriots and my role model. To commemorate the 96th birth anniversary of the martyr, NETKASTLE, Coimbatore's leading browsing centre entrusted me upon building a simple yet special site for the martyr. I built bhagatsingh.cjb.net with the help of Geocities PageBuilder , my favourite web building software. During the process, I had the oppurtunity to study a lot of links on Bhagat Singh. I would be using all these links to edit the category Bhagat Singh at dmoz.org, the human edited directory of the web. For your info, I am the editor of the category of my motivator in chief A.R.Rahman. To personally celebrate the Shaheed's birthday, I finally brought the book I badly wanted to buy "BHAGAT SINGH - The Martyr: Experiments in Revolution" by the renowned Kuldip Nayar. I should appreciate the services of Fabmall for this book. They were lightning quick in authorisation and delivery of the product, something which Rediff has to practice a lot.

It has become a fashion amongst the current generation of netizens to have attractive domain names in their e-mail addresses, say vijay@hehe.com, chairman@ididitmyway.com etc. Mail.com offers a lot of subdomains like writers.net, cheerful.com, etc. I had previously trusted MyOwnEmail.com, but the service has gone from Unpredictable to poor and then to worse. Everyonemail.net which was providing free e-mail services to Webmaster previously has now opened its doors for general netizens also, and try your name @Internetfan.com, @Math.com etc. All the same I request all the netizens not to take these services more serious, as there has been a sudden closure of free email service in many sites like Tehelka.com, Indiatarget.com, Smackdown.com, Bigmx.com etc and I had to pay a light penalty for having my account with these sites. If you are inclined on having multiple e-mail addresses, do peruse Free E-mail Provider's Guide or SiteFree's VirtualAve or Free E-mail Addresses Directory.

Before I sign off, I request you all to visit the following sites which interested me in my E-LORE last month.

1. Trade my Traffic, a unique Web Advertising and Promotion Service

2. ReelCards and Cards4Everybody, two scintillating sites for E-greetings.

3. SeekIdeas.com, a forum to idealise yoor idolising ideas

4. MathHelper, a Wonderful Calculator Service for all sort of mathematical conversions and calculations, except for Currency Conversions

5. HTMLprimer.com, a great site for learning HTML

And thats for good Old september. I am looking forward to look you all next month, with more sites to forward and foreword

Urs always
Rathnavel
www.reavan.cjb.net

Thursday, September 04, 2003

Countrymen

My September Wishes to you all. And let me concisely present my online explorations this August

Actually my blogger and my system had a conflict for the past two days, and that caused a delay in Blogging. I hope the tragedy doesnt continue. So taking the principle "Beter Late than Never", lemme go at the explorations this month....

My exploring has been on a low this week, thanks to yet another DSL cable problem from Dishnet DSL, my ISP which cost me connection for three days. My Rotaract Club Activities kept me as busy as my ENVOTEAM activities. It was very tasking at my proffesional. Yet I ran into a few sites, as usual.

Let me take this oppurtunity to list out my offline sources for knowing about websites. It is mainly through the print media and through advertisements. The newspapers The Hindu, Dinamalar,and magazines Internet Ulagam, Competition Master and AnandaVikatan offer a variety of sites, which is valuable for any online exlporer akin to me. It was in the Sunday's Dinamalar that I came to know about the website GoogleAlert. This is a wonderful website that alerts you through e-mail on new Google websites for a particular keyword. It requires sign up, but a great service for those who want updates and information on every topic.

One of my areas of interest in Worldwideweb has been e-Marketing. And in my continous search of information on Web Marketing, I find the articles from DavidFrey, The Marketing Bible on Best Marketing Practices quite useful. As I was browsing through the comments on his new Audio marketing concept, i came across the website Ez4you computers. The website should be a cool one for beginners, as it offers a good amount of info on various topics like fundamentals, acronyms, Smileys etc, which are very essential at the Neolithic stages

I accidentally landed into the site TeacherVision.com. The site seems a great one for those teachers, who want to create a difference. The site offers quantitative amounts of qualitative links on teaching resources. It also has printable forms that can be used for Classroom Management.A huge links of softwares and books are priced in this website to cater the needs of all aspects of teaching. It also has inspirational cards and posters for teachers. A site all teachers may find cool, which will find their students ultimately cool. I also found that the site also offered a plethora of sites like MySchoolOnline.com, FactMonster.com, Infoplease.com etc for specific audiences.

I always believe that the Internet has redefined the Global Limits of Integration. And if atall, the whole world should integrate for a thing, it should be for the preservation of the environment. As an environmental engineer, and as a explorer, I found it heartening to see A Workshop on Internet for Environmental Communication, and the discussions of thesame being available to the Environment Community

A noteable feauture of my explorations today is the hatred I developed for Zdos.com, a website for free subdomains. I had used the services of the website for various websites, including my new Website Kanika Exclusive. However I found that the particular Kanika Link does not work now,while the site and other subdomains functions smoothly. And even now,Zdos.com does not show up. I can only blame and revert to sites likeminded sites cjb.net and webalias.com

The pdf documents have come here for stay, and you always run into pdf documents, if you are in education/proffesional related information search. For those who want to create pdf documents, and do not have working knowledge or Acrobar Writer software, www.neevia.com offers a great service Neevia Express. Using this free to try converter service, you can easily and quickly convert your MS-Office files into pdf documents.The converted pdf can also be easily downloaded.

Before I conclude, let my pass over a few sites noted in my diary. At this moment, I should appreciate the increasingly popular Google Ads (in place of regular Banner Ads) for introducing more relevant and useful sites. like these. The AccountLogon Site seems to be interesting. It boasts of a password management software, whereby you can access all online accounts through single password without compromising security. I havent tried the software for the want of time and courage. The site also offers prominent webmaster tools. Speaking of Webmaster Tools, I am reminded of WebMasterToolsCentral that offers a wide range of free & priced softwares,tools that would go well with the Web Designers. The UK based FreeBuilderSite also links to relevant WebMasterTools, apart from elucidating on principles and execution of Websites. The Template Hunter also offers a lot of advanced Webmaster tools, with an eye on Templates.

And that's the LORE this month, and I am looking forward for exploring more sites in the forthcoming week.

Urs always
Rathnavel

Monday, August 04, 2003

To start with, I will give my Top Ten Websites, as on July 2003. The opinion can be found at www.mouthshut.com titled My BEST BOOKMARKS(As mouthshut.com figures in my Top Ten, I feel it need not be elaborated here)

It is really a horrendous task to catch hold of 10 websites out of 10 lakh sites,that you would like the most.Selecting the 10 favourite sites in the Internet is more complicated as we have to give weightage to many aspects,which work out to be highly contradictory.There may be good proffesional sites, but Fan sites may also be equally well worked.There may be a good site that you visit almost everyday,but there are also some wonderful websites that you need not go through much often.There may be some sites,whose purpose makes you to go to the site.All the same there are few sites which would pull you in with their designs.There also exist sites that may either assume global importance,or confine to regional boundaries.And it would be impossible for even Napolean Bonaparte to get a good blend of all these varied parameters into one single website.

Therefore the selection of 10 favourite websites would be a complex one,if you put your mind into play.It has been relatively easier for me to pick my Top Ten Internet Sites,following my heart,and here are MY BEST BOOKMARKS

10.www.reavan.cjb.net - The Personal Power

It is my personal website.Though I would not like to br narcisstic,I think I had worked well with the design and the content part of the website.And important of all,I understood the hardship faced by a person to involved in creating and more importantly updating a website.I dont think it is a bad or a regulatory fan site,all the same I accept it has miles to go for becoming a noticeable website.

09.www.constantcontact.com and www.evite.com - Proffesional and People Oriented

If you are interested in Internet marketing,you would never want to miss this simple website.The website provides a highly proffesional e-mail campaign manager,which works in a simply flawless manner with amazing e-mail list building and reporting.And their email articles on the current online marketing is a worth read for any Ramesh,Rajesh or Suresh.I simply love this site for its proffesionalism,and simplicity.It is the same proffesionalism and people -oriented aspects that stage high in Evite.com,the online invitation service.With its good address building, and cool design feautures,evite.com would definetely find the favour with all its users.And did I say that both are free services?

08.www.tamilterra.com - Worth a Pat Anytime

’’where there is a will,there is a way’’.tamilterra.com is indeed one great example for the above quote.The webmaster may find it hard running the website with his unstable background,but he always gets into the act with the support of his users,for whom it would be a big loss.This site is aimed at providing for free mp3 music, image gallery and other entertainment files (latest and old),and the webmaster does more than a fair job.The ease of dowloading,clarity of the songs,mailing of updates and the design are something stupendous and unique.

07.www.quizyourfriends.com- Making Things Easy

A cool service that lets you quiz your friends online in a simple manner.Moreover it establishes a concrete connection with your mailbox,that it provides e-mail updates on every activity that takes place with your quiz.It may be used as a questionnare alsa,but the most amazing thing is the simplicity with which the process runs.It is very easy to create the quiz and the quiz looks good too.Though it may not sound exciting,your experience would bring you high level happiness.

06.www.bravenet.com-It’s a Free Mans World

If you think you would need to strengthen yourself economically for a prospective position in the Internet,you are correct till you login to www.bravenet.com.This site is a webmaster’s delight as it offers anything under the net for free,and the quality of the web service is really superb.And things are so easy that everyone from an amaeteur to amazing webmaster can convert his ideas to reality spendind very less on his/her paisa.

05.www.ogphoto.com- Simply HeartWarming

Greetings are something special,and they have evolved to one great manner in this Internet.Today you walk into a lot of greeting card sites,that offer you the best of the cards,animated,technology supported so that they become more interactive.These greeting cards are intended to make you smile and go jumpin around.But to me, a greeting card’s end product should be a sense of satisfaction rather than simply rocking.And thats why I found the services of ogphoto.com as something special.The beautiful and natural pictures are substantiated with colourful quotations, and melodious music,and the whole process is simple enough.The site relies less on advertising, orients more towards the users, and are constantly updating themselves, all with due respect to mother nature.

04.www.thesonalibendre.com - Certifying Creativity and Craziness

Fans tend to more creative and more passionate, and easily outdo the proffesional websites,when it comes to celebrity sites.But in the website,this fan of the lovely lady Sonali Bendre Behl has worked heart and soul and pulls you inside with his stunning design and detailed content.The site is as attractive and beautiful as the lady herself.And the site is a testimony to the creativity of the person,which has evolved more because of his craze on the artist.

03.www.mouthshut.com-The Perfect Mix

mouthshut.com walked into my life,as the near perfect blend of discussion and interactiveness,I looked upon a website with good quantity of qualitative users.But I never taught that I would go on to get addicted to this website and hone my writing skills.The website is a pleasant one,and you should know better.

02.www.google.com-The Guide

I cant imagine a day in the Net without google.com.I hardly opt for any other search engine,as google provides you with the right answers in the right manner and in right time.I always like to run into a wonderful site everyday,and google.com has been more than an able ally in directing new websites.Its hard to go and speak about google.com,because it can be easily told in two words ’’ THE BEST’’

01.www.yahoo.com-The Paradise on the Net

It is simply heaven of the net,where everything is proffesional,simple,superb and importantly free.I have always loved the Yahooo Group service,and I have the highest regard for its long list of stunning services like Mail,Photos,Geocities,Greetings etc.Yahoo is indeed a gateway that allows an ordinary citizen become a valuable netizen,In one word,it is paradise.

This list is subject to change and frequent updates. For an explorer like me ’’Heard Melodies are sweet.But those unheard are sweeter’’

URS ALWAYS, Rathnavel, www.reavan.cjb.net