Updates on the website

It has been a rather hectic day with a whole bunch of new articles published. Let us take a look at what did we accomplish in last couple of hours.

• As we have been saying all along, skincare or a visit to the spa is not just for women. Men need to do the same if they care about their bodies and want not to age. Read Peter Foss's tips on how to find a spa for men and what treatments to have.
• 50 First Dates. No, we are not talking about the movie starring Drew Barrymore. We are talking about the new e-book by the former Baywatch star-turned-relationship-diva, April Masini. In her book, 50 First Dates, she comes up with 50 great ideas for first dates. Read the review of 50 First Dates.
• Imfwama Wotela is back with four excellent articles for women. This times she deals with the topic of rejection (by men), the resulting loneliness, and how developing a spiritual attitude can enable them to handle rejection and loneliness. Here are her four articles:
  
  Fear of rejection among women: How to deal with rejection by men in a relationship?
  
  Stop being lonely: How to take control of your life and build your self-esteem?
  
  Leading a spiritual life: How to learn from Nature and understand the true meaning of life?
  
  An easy-to-follow self-esteem program for women: How to overcome loneliness and rejection and overcome low self esteem?

Data recovery for home PC

The crashing of hard drives and loss of valuable data is a serious concern for many of our fans and readers. When we received several emails asking for easy-to-follow advice, we asked our lifestyle expert to do the research and provide simple steps. So below is the link to the article on how to protect your data and and how to respond when you do have a hard drive crash:

Tips on data recovery: What to do to preserve your data and how to respond when the hard drive crashes

Home improvement and remodeling ideas

The lifestyle channel on MYNIPPON is coming along nicely since it was launched in September 2004. As part of our efforts to share simple tips on better management of your finances and to increase the value of your assets, we are trying to bring you new ideas and suggestions.

This morning we have published an article on home improvement and remodeling. The idea is to use your home equity to borrow to make changes in the home that will add value. That way you have reinvested in your home and when you sell it, you will walk away with some tax-free dollars from appreciation.

MYNIPPON older version still available

A lot of the fans of MYNIPPON have asked us about the older version of the websites and enquired about some past articles. Since MYNIPPON had a makeover, we made many changes. After all, now that we have been around for about 5 years, a change was overdue. Technology has changed, some content was no longer relevant, trends changes, and websites that do not provide fresh content to their readers simply die.

So we did the following:

• Some articles that were totally outdated have been deleted. Either these pages have been totally deleted or overwritten.
• Some articles that were outdated but would still be of interest to our readers have been archived and you can access the MYNIPPON articles archive.
• All fresh articles are featured on the MYNIPPON home page and also at the bottom of each page so that when you visit any page on our website you can check out the latest content.

Love stories on MYNIPPON

As we indicated in our previous article, telling stories on MYNIPPON, is one of our very popular features. So here we go! Here are some more:

Indian woman meets American man: An Indian woman finds love with an American colleague; her first relationship ever with a non-Indian

A Japanese man discovers America through his relationship with an American woman: May travels to Japan to study dioxin pollution but ends up teaching a Japanese men about the mysticism and charm of American women

Cinderella: A woman finds her dreamboy: She finds the love of her dream and wonders how she got so lucky

Kissing a Japanese girl: A romantic love story of an African American GI in Japan

Short, sweet, and memorable relationship: These are the ones that stay in mind forever

Two-timing women: Adultery hurts relationships

Relationships with Japanese women: It always doesn't work out great

Sweet memories of a romantic relationship: Memories of a great romance never go away

Meeting a woman, falling in love, and a breakup: Story of a man who has a terrible experience with a Japanese girl

Health related articles on MYNIPPON

As we transform MYNIPPON from a relationships focus to more of a lifestyle website, we are trying to add one important area - Health. As part of that effort, while we do not plan on giving medical advice, we do want to highlight important developments that could have an impact on the health of our readers.

To start off that process, we have written two articles:

Mesothelioma (or asbestos cancer): What are your options if you have ever worked with asbestos?

Injured by Vioxx (arthritis drug from Merck): How to consult with a doctor and an attorney?

Telling stories on MYNIPPON

As many of MYNIPPON's long-term fans know we have used stories to convey very powerful messages. We have learned over the years that no matter how interesting you make an article, there is nothing more interesting than a story. And if it is real, it is even better.

So as part of our rebooting, we have brought back many old stories and of course, added a few new ones. Considering how popular these are, we plan on bringing a few more during the next few months.

Please note that almost all stories are based on the experiences of our visitors so if you would like to make a contribution simply contact MYNIPPON.

Here is a partial listing of the some of the stories on our website:

Romance of a mature Californian woman with a younger man

Experiences of a model with her photographer

Differences in dating styles

An extramarital affair with the permission of the wife

Pearl earrings: A surprise gift

Adultery among men can be addictive

Being bold but also a gentleman

Women and their dreams

Website makeover experience

Since the MYNIPPON.com makeover began in August 2004, it seems that we never really got done. That is what happens when you have a massive website and only finite resources. We are almost there but not fully there. Some of our pages are still blank (not good) and we have enormous amount of content that is ready to be plugged in but we do not have the time.

It is good to have ready-to-use content since you can update the website more often without working too hard but we want to get as much content published right away as we can so that the website can be crawled and results presented to our fans. Having said that, we have read in many places that search engines, Google in particular, does not like websites with massive updates in a short period of time. So we don't know who to believe. We will just do what works best for us and stop worrying about what a stupid spider thinks.

So till then, enjoy the fruits of our labor in form of guilt-free love and life.

MYNIPPON rebooted: results and experience

As many of you know, sometime in late August 2004, MYNIPPON.com was literally rebooted. Or in other words, the website was completely redesigned with a new layout and Google AdSense text ads were incorporated replacing many of the affiliate programs that we were initially marketing (plus we had to make some content changes to comply with the new terms of service). For a website with approximately 1,000 pages, it was no small task. While we were able to get the new complete website online in about two weeks, the changes were far too many and we are guessing that it drove the spiders nuts. God knows how they interpreted all the changes.

The traffic did drop from our previous highs (and it was expected) but the quality of our traffic has improved exponentially. We are now attracting the right kind of audience that fits better with our new strategy. How did we do it? By shifting the focus of the content to target our audience.

What did we learn from the reboot?

1. If resources allow you to, do not bring down the website completely. Make a copy, do the redesign, and then publish it again.
2. Do not delete a page from the web. It is better to change the content of a page, but it might lead to lower rank in search engines but eventually it will percolate through the system and you will achieve your initial rank.
3. If you want to completely remove an article, clean up the page, and just put a link to another page on your website. Do not use the redirect command (while more convenient, search engines do not like it).
4. Do not delete any images from the web even if you are no longer using them on a page. It appears that the images seem to stay in the index for years after they have been removed from the website. You will only get too many error messages because of that.
5. While Google spiders visit MYNIPPON.com about 3-4 times a day on an average, they don't do a perfect job of updating. Some content in the cache can remain unchanged for weeks or even months. So just be patient and let the system update itself over time.
6. Keep your fans in the loop so that they can be patient while you are renovating the website. If you change the architecture of the website, make sure that you provide search capabilities (see examples of search on MYNIPPON) so that old fans can still easily find what they are looking for.

Recommended link: Why you should use content management tools to simplify nanopublishing?

Outsourcing husbands to Asia

On one hand we have our society that emphasizes equality of men and women, but on the other hand, this equality has had some negative outcomes because men and women have not used their freedom with responsibilities. While no reasonable person would argue that we take these freedoms away from women, many experts attribute the high divorce rate in America to both men and women misunderstanding the true meaning of equality. (Related article: Don't let your marriage fall apart and result in a divorce)

So is it true that a lot of women are now starting to look for traditional men and have a traditional marriage. You know one in which the man is the main breadwinner and the woman takes care of him and the children. While there have always been women who have liked this idea even in today's society, I would not be surprised if this trend catches on as the unemployment situation in the US continues to be bad leaving many women unemployed or underemployed and forcing them to find men who can provide for them. (Related article: Saving marriage in America)

But there are other reasons as well why women like traditional men and traditional marriages, particularly with Asian men. Kathleen, a woman from Washington, tells us that she married her Japanese husband for a variety of reasons but more importantly because he is so different than American men that she was dating before. "The main reason to marry him, of course, was that I fell in love with him as he did with me. What I do love about my husband the most, though, is how gentle and considerate he is. Coming from Washington where I dated a lot of men, I really had difficulty finding a suitor who appreciated a more traditional marriage. I enjoy being the primary homemaker (I teach part-time). I enjoy taking care of my husband, and take pride in our home. He respects my role as a housewife where the American men I dated were always so worried about having everything divided equally; cooking, cleaning, working, bills, etc. I missed the 'idea' of a traditonal marriage and became tired of dating male feminists."

No wonder then that Abby says, "I want to go to Asia and want to renew my life. I want a real man to marry me, seriously... that's it."

So buckle up Asian men, it seems that we are also offshoring our 'husbands' after all the IT jobs.

Recommended link: Physical intimacy is key to a strong relationship

Voice of Latinas on the Net

As many of you already know, eCreativa network has several websites targeting specific segments. Lindisima.com is designed for Spanish-speaking women but on popular demand we are now pleased to announce the launch of the English version of Lindisima.com, the most successful website in the eCreativa network of websites. As many of you know, the Spanish version of Lindisima.com attracts over 10,000 visitors a day, from many countries, particularly Mexico, United States, Spain, and other countries in Latin America.

The website was always published in Spanish but there are millions of women that trace their roots to Hispanic and Latin culture but either do not understand Spanish very well or also prefer to read English language publications but targeted to them. Afer market research over a 6-month period we were able to confirm that what our readers were telling us was right: Latinas in the US need a portal that talks to them.

Our research also shows that Lindisima.com English version will be of use to non-Hispanic women as well since no matter what your origin is, information about health, fitness, beauty, wellness, relationships, etc. is more or less the same.

So please check out Lindisima.com: Latinas on the Internet

Searching for a good man

Nancy Ryder, a flight attendant in Michigan, did not realize how difficult it would be to meet a good man after she had crossed that magic number 30. When she approached us to share her story, particularly her experiences with men in her life, we readily agreed and so started the column Find a good man.

In a series of postings to her online diary she talks about her years growing up and what she has gone through. More importantly how she met her first boyfriend Don. Today she talks about her second date with Don, or should we say her first real date with him. How she is nervous about the whole thing and what thoughts go through her mind.