+961

Is that enough explanation for the lack of posts on +961?

I actually got married on July 1st and I’m currently spending some time (AKA honeymoon) at probably one of the best places on earth. Phuket, Thailand.

See you in a while!

Thanks to a ”technical difficulty” my host was facing, you might have noticed that +961 was down for the past two days. Needless to say, I’m now searching for a new host. Any suggestions?

It’s all over the Lebanese blogsphere now… Yesterday night I went to T-Marbout along with several Lebanese bloggers to meet with Philippe Couve, Pierre Haski (www.rue89.com), and Eric Scherer from Radio France Internationale.

The meeting purpose was for the French journalists and bloggers to get to know more about the Lebanese blogsphere and its status. We discussed several issues such as why blogging isn’t very popular here in Lebanese, and why do some bloggers post very frequently when things heat up in Lebanon and then dump their blogs when everything calms down. They were also interested in knowing if anyone of us had a problem with the authorities because of some content (I wasn’t surprised with that question, at the end we’re an Arab country!).

In addition, while discussing the Lebanese people in general, we all agreed that they hate to read and write, they’re just good at grasping already processed information. Which explains why they’re all active on Facebook, and very few of them thought of starting a blog. Lazy nation!

w heik..! by the end of the meetup I was glad I had the chance to finally meet Maya Zankoul & Tarek Chemaly.

Here’s a list of the bloggers who were there:

20minutes.fr
beirutntsc.blogspot.com
choueichoueibeyrouth.blogspot.com
qussa.nl
diaryofahalfandhalf.wordpress.com
mayazankoul.wordpress.com
29letters.wordpress.com
klekeesh.blogspot.com
hanane.me
onoffbeirut.com
rue89.com
atelier.rfi.fr
kibot.blog.com
bloggingbeirut.com

And finally, here’s what others have posted about the meeting:

Maya Zankoul
Tarek Chemaly
Samer Karam
Pierre Haski
Hummus Nation (a blogger I really would like to meet someday!)

Once again, I got a new theme, I know it’s not good to change themes very frequently but this one is “cleaner” and its comment section is much cooler!

What do you think?

Just started to install a new theme on the blog… hope nothing goes wrong!

Update:

I am almost done, everything went fine except for some compatibilty issues with Internet Explorer (I HATE IT!).
The main advantage of this theme is the 3 tabbed widgets to the right (Recent posts, Recent comments, and Archives), and they appear normally in Firefox, however I noticed they’re appearing under each other in Internet Explorer. I promise I will work on fixing it by tonight.

I will also restore the missing widgets (Beirut photos & Eyes of Lebanon) later today.

Still, I’d love to have your feedback, what do you think about the new theme? Anything to improve?

Update 2:

Woohoo! I fixed the tabbed widgets! They’re working fine on Internet Explorer now.
The contact is now gone for a while since its background doesn’t match the new theme. Gotta go find a better one.

Update 3:

Be careful what colors you choose next time you plan the change your website theme, I just got a question asking if I am a aounist since the color of “961″ in the header above is orange!!

As you might have noticed I have added 2 new pages just below the header, “My Photography” where you can see a slideshow containing some of the best photos I’ve taken so far, and “Contact” where you can… you know what!

I noticed today morning that all the blog links (posts, pages) are down, nothing is functioning except for the homepage…

It must be the result, of yesterday’s migration. I am currently following up on the issue with my webhost support.

Update: All is working great now!

+961 went down for more than 8 hours today because my host was migrating my account to a faster server. But for some reason they forgot to mention to me the IP address of the new server, so plus961.com ended up pointing to nowhere!

Anyway, the problem is now solved, DNS updated, and I’m back on track!

Did you notice what I recently added on the right under “Eyes of Lebanon”?

It’s a drop down list containing various locations in Beirut and the surroundings, when you choose location and click “Check Area” a new window will open containing a snapshot taken by a webcam positioned at that location, and the snapshots will auto refresh every 30 seconds, even if you kept the window open.

It’s not a new idea, the service is actually available via the LBC Group website through a service called “Eyes of Lebanon“. There you will find the very same webcam locations, except that the location links are spread on a dedicated webpage. So I thought of using my scripting skills and gather all these links into one drop down list that would fit in my sidebar, and let the readers check them out!

The webcams can be very beneficial sometimes when you need to check if there’s traffic congestion at one of the available areas. (Actually that’s their main purpose!)

P.S: If you would like to publish them on your website as well, I will  be glad to provide you with the script I wrote. Just contact me on rami[at]plus961[dot]com

I usually use flickr to publish my photos online, and lately I’ve been searching for some script that would pull my photostream from flickr and publish it on some dedicated page here. I finally found FlickrViewer which does a great job, not to forget that it’s easy to setup.

So today, I present to you my humble set of photos on the following link:
http://plus961.com/photos (I also added a link to it under “Blogroll” on the right).

Enjoy the collection and keep coming! the page will be frequently updated.