Join the fight!

Swine Flu India – A fight against pandemic is an attempt to bring in one place useful information that would help the citizens to fight the spread of H1N1 Swine flu. Started by three “techies” from Bengaluru, the site has received around 60,000 visits and over 1,50,000 pageviews in a short span of time. The site shows as the first result in Google for the search query “Swine Flu India”. The site is a voluntary effort and does not seek any monetary gains.

“You ride to battle, but not to victory” – The Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King

The pace at which things have changed over the past few days is something that we three are unable to keep up with. We have other commitments (our day jobs) and devote our free time in improving and maintaining this site, answering queries we receive by mail and managing the twitter account and facebook page we have created. Given the fast changing sequence of events and given our limited time, we simply cannot keep up with pace of changes. So will this website remain a potent weapon in the fight against pandemic?

“Har desh perfect nahin hota... use perfect banana padta hai” - Rang De Basanti

“Be the change you want to see in this world” – Mahatma Gandhi

Do the above lines strike a chord with you? If yes, then read on...

Pranav Prakash, a software engineer from Pune, visited our site and found that the information we had was outdated. Many new screening centres had opened up in Pune and should have been available on our site. He not just informed us about the short-coming, but coordinated with us to provide the info about the new screening centres. He continues to provide us with suggestions and information. We have thanked Pranav on our credits page for his selfless acts.

But this fight needs more warriors like Pranav, and we are sure there are many out there who are wondering what they can do to help. Calling all warriors to “Join the Fight!”

Here is how you can help:

1. Sub: updated page

The pages in swinefluindia.com are built using simple HTML and CSS. So if you want to add some information to a page, simply modify the page and send it across to us. For example, you want to add a few more screening centres in Mumbai. Go to the Mumbai page on our website and save a local copy of the page. Open the local copy of the webpage using any HTML editor* and add the information that you want to add. Test your page in any of the modern browsers (We test on IE8, FF3 and Chrome) to ensure everything’s working fine. Add a short description in the Change History and mail the page to us. If you have changed anything in the style-sheet, follow the same procedure there. It is not necessary that any info be added, for you may just improve the look and feel of existing pages. We will then compare your version of the page with our version, do the necessary testing and then upload the changes with your contribution added in the credits page.

Send the updated page to swinefluindia at gmail dot com and ensure that the Subject is “updated page” (all lower case). We use filters and labels to screen our emails, so a wrong subject line would result in an unnecessary delay. Also, copy and paste the change description you wrote in the page, in the body of your email so it makes it easy for us to understand what you have sent.

All emails received with “updated page” as subject will be given the highest priority. Please note that not all pages received will necessarily be updated. This could be for one of the following reasons:

1. The information that you sent is not completely relevant to the site - This is a grey area as what may seem relevant to you may not be seen as relevant to us. Here are a few guidelines :

· The info you are adding is a fact and not an opinion. We are looking for useful info like screening centre telephone details, address, cost of testing, procedure at the testing centre, procedure to sanitize offices etc. We are not looking for opinions like what the government should do, whether Tamiflu should really be used etc. If you want to discuss such things, you are free to do so, on the Discussions in our facebook page or any other forum. If you are still not clear whether your info will be accepted, please mail us with the subject “update query”, before you start coding the HTML.

2. The info you are adding is not verifiable. The best way for this is to provide a link to a trusted source like the WHO, MoHFW, State Government Health Department Sites, newspapers and media sites etc. If you are unable to find an online link to a newspaper clipping, you could send us a scanned copy of the clipping, photo of the clipping taken by your or your friends’ digi-cam or mobile camera or any other innovative way you can think of. If you are not sure, mail us with the subject “update query” and we will try to help you out in the best way possible.

3. The info is already available on the site. Please check the web-site before you start coding your HTML.

4. The page you sent causes technical issues in the functioning of the website. While I don’t see how static HTML can cause any issues, your modifications to the style-sheet could affect other pages. In such, cases the team may have to modify the code that you send. The team will inform you of any such cases. Your contribution will still stand.J

5. Any other reason that the team cannot foresee at this point. The decision of the team in Bangalore will be final. That’s the way it’s going to work folks. We request you to trust our judgement on what should and should not go on the web-site. However if you are not satisfied, start an argument on the facebook page.

*Free HTML Editors are available for download if you don’t already have one (and you are not comfortable using notepad!) If you want to learn/revise HTML & CSS please visit W3Schools on the internet. We have found that listening to music you love while coding leads to better code and neater looking pages J

2. Sub: updated info

We have our hands full and information is changing pretty fast. We may not even know what new info has come up. You can help us by providing info. We believe we will get the maximum number of responses in this category of contribution. The guidelines mentioned for info submission mentioned above stand, so please read them. Please make sure that the subject of the mail you send is “updated info” (all lower case). Your contribution will be acknowledged in the credits page as and when the info is updated.

3. Publicize the site

Swinefluindia.com is a voluntary initiative and we do not seek any monetary gains. This also means that we are dependent on the community for publicity of the site. You can publicize this site by telling your friends and family about it, writing about the site and the community initiative on your blog, sharing it with people on social networking sites like twitter, Facebook and Orkut or simply emailing (community beneficial spamming!) about the site to your friends and groups like google and yahoo groups.

When a 100 people get to know about the site, 80 will actually visit it, 60 will read this blog about joining the fight, 40 will think about joining the fight, 20 will put an effort to find ways in which they can contribute, 10 will find ways in which they can contribute, 5 will end up contributing to the site. The more people get to know about this site, the more people will contribute, the more relevant this site will become.

 

Looking forward to your support and contributions!

A Clarification

While scanning the web for mentions of our website, we came across this article on timesofindia.indiatimes.com titled “Booming Business in the time of Swine Flu”. Our website is mentioned in this article. Following are extracts from the article that we would like to highlight.

“Here’s how money is being made (legally) out of an epidemic:”

“* Websites
Even Indian websites on swine have witnessed heavy traffic on Tuesday. People from Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and Delhi are clicking away for information. Sites with domain names dedicated to the flu in India like www.swinefluindia.com, and www.swineflu-india.org recorded the highest traffic yesterday. “We have seen an unprecedented growth in traffic on our site. We have received a lot of mails and our page rank on Google has improved drastically,’’ said a spokesperson of swinefluindia.com”

This gives an impression that swinefluindia.com is earning money as a result of the increase in traffic it has witnessed. We would like to reaffirm that swinefluindia.com is a purely voluntary effort and the team does not seek any monetary gains. You will not find any sort of Sponsored Links or Google Ads on our site. This has also been reported in this article by The Indian Express.

To clarify our position, we also posted a comment on the article at timesofindia.indiatimes.com. This comment was posted more than 12 hours ago but is still not live. The text of the comment we posted is given below:

“Hello,

Thank you for mentioning our site in your esteemed news-site. While no-where in your article you mention that swinefluindia.com is making a profit, the title of your article "Booming Business in the time of Swine Flu" suggests that the website is making a profit.
I would like to enlighten your readers that swinefluindia.com is a voluntary initiative and the site does not seek commercial benefits. Hence, unlike the other sites, you will not find any sort of Google Ads or Sponsored Links on our site.
For more info, the readers may please visit blog.swinefluindia.com for the words straight from the horse's mouth.
Thank You for your time!”

Needless to say the team felt very discouraged on reading this article. A voluntary effort such as swinefluindia.com runs on just one fuel – motivation. The encouragement that we have received from the visitors of this site has been the fuel that has kept us going.

We have the highest regard for a leading news-site like timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Given the huge traffic that such news-sites generate, managing comments and content can be a challenge. We just hope to see our comment clarifying our position appear along with that article.

However, as we were not sure when that would happen, we decided to write this post to clarify the matter.

We will continue to update and improve the site so that it has more useful information which will help us in the fight against this pandemic.

Hoping for your continued support and encouragement!

Swine Flu India . com – A Note about the site

When one of us, back from a foreign assignment in Zurich, fell sick, there were less than 20 confirmed cases of swine flu in the country. Suspecting that our friend might have contracted the disease we thought it best to get him tested and ensure that he was not responsible for spreading the virus. However, we realized that even if one wants to act responsibly and get himself/herself tested, information on who to contact and what to do was extremely difficult to find. The first place we looked for such info was google but we couldn’t find any useful information. We also realized that the people coming from abroad were most likely to bring the virus to India and would most likely follow the same approach of searching google for finding information on how to get tested. Realizing the need for a website which not only provides the relevant information, but also shows in the search results when people search for such information, we started work on swinefluindia.com.

The website was up on June 21 with some basic information. We gathered the information from the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare Swine Flu website, WHO site and CDC website. While information was available in these sites, the top results in search engines were links to news articles. So we tried to optimize our pages to show in the search results for terms people would most likely search for. We are no experts in SEO, so we were delighted to be one of the results in the second page of google when you searched for Swine Flu India. We had an average of 20 hits per day for most of June and July, with most of them being from us I suspect. :(

However, August 3 was the tipping point with over a 100 visits and the number of hits per day has been climbing like anything. Our analytics shows an increase of 2,266.52% in the number of visits as of today! Our site is also showing as the first result for the search term swine flu india. We have started and continue to receive many inquiries, suggestions and appreciations from people all over.

As the team who started this site, we are aware of the tremendous responsibility that has fallen upon us to make this site more useful, updated and interactive. We are already working on incorporating more features to the website. Even though we are working professionals who are investing their free time in this effort, we will try our best to be as quick and responsive. We would also like to state that this is a purely voluntary effort and we are not seeking any commercial gains, unlike some of the other websites on swine flu which have cropped up. We are also exploring ways in which we can engage you, the community at large, to help us in this effort. For now, please just spread the word about this website by tweeting the link, mailing your friends and family, posting about it on your blog and sharing the link to this website on social networks like Facebook and Orkut.

The fight against swine flu is going to be a long haul. Criticizing the government is not going to stop the disease from spreading. Working together, not panicking, keeping oneself and others informed is the way forward for all of us. Hoping for your continued support and encouragement.

PS:

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