Category: Blog Info

Some of you might spot it, some of you might not.

Update: I changed things back again. Its a long story..

For the next three months Alghanim Automotive will be the main sponsors for the website. As you can see they have purchased the banner space on the top of the sidebar and they might be swapping their ads every 2 weeks or whenever they have a new offer.

Alghanim Automative are the dealers for Cadillac, Chevrolet, Hummer, Opel and Saab and around every two weeks I will be invited to try out a certain car. That should turn out to be really fun since I haven’t done anything like that before. Most importantly they will not be interfering in the reviews which is also a cool thing.

This support by Alghanim Automotive is a good thing for the site because the money from this deal will be reinvested into the website. I met the Alghanim marketing team last week and they are a nice young group who are great fans of the blog so I am glad to be working with them.

The next few months will be very interesting and filled with surprises so enjoy the ride.

I was just checking my website stats and everything is showing in Arabic. I hope this is an April Fools joke by TivoGuy since I am hosted on his server.. [Link]

Update: Ok now its back to normal.. weird..

The highest amount of visitors the site received in one day last month was on March 3rd with 6,989 unique visitors. The lowest amount of visitors in one day was 4,087 and that was on March 31th. The average amount of visitors per day for March was 4,912 compared to 4,799 for February. The total amount of visitors in the month of March was 152,277 compared to February’s 134,375. For more details you can check the [Website Stats].

A couple of days ago I was contacted by Bazaar magazine and was offered a chance to have my own “B-Sides” page in the magazine every month where I could post mini reviews on anything related to Kuwait. At first the idea sounded really interesting, combining blog with print sounded like an excellent opportunity. But the more I thought about it the more I realized.. excellent opportunity for what? What could I gain with this?

Increased Readership
Bazaar prints around 25,000 copies a month while 248AM gets more then 3 times that amount of visitors every month and we are still growing. Bazaar readers would only read around 4 mini reviews by me every month while my blog readers would read at least 4 mini posts by me a day. My sites url would be advertised in that Bazaar page but from those 25,000 readers how many would actually think about checking out my site? When was the last time anyone saw a url in a magazine and then checked it out online.. it happens but just not that often.

Digital to Print
At first this sounded interesting, but then I realized isn’t that a step backward? Isn’t print trying to get online? Shouldn’t Bazaar start thinking about getting online instead? WIRED magazine have a small 2 page section where they print interesting posts from the web but I never liked that section but thats besides the point, WIRED can do whatever they want since their whole Magazine is published for free online anyway.

The Money
The first offer I got was KD20 (yes two and one zero) a month. I calculated the amount of time and effort I would have to put extra every month to have at least 4 mini reviews of something interesting to do with Kuwait and I realized KD20 wouldn’t be worth my trouble at all. Bazaar were nice to say they would consider another amount I had in mind but if they had KD20 in their mind to begin with I doubt they would go that much higher.

The Magazine
Do I even like Bazaar? Not really. I do think its the best locally published magazine but thats because their competition is really crap. I pick up Bazaar once a month so I can skim through it quickly and see if there is anything interesting. I mostly don’t find anything worth reading and the magazine ends up in the trash or left on a food court table. I enjoy reading local blogs a lot more then I enjoy reading Bazaar thats for sure.

Who’s the boss?
When someone suggested to Zaydoun that he should hook up with one of the newspapers as a syndicated writer, Zaydoun replied saying “I am my own editor… I can’t imagine being subjected to deadlines and editorial controls!”.

So taking everything above into consideration, I sent an email back to Bazaar today morning thanking them for their kind offer but that I wasn’t interested. I think I made the right decision.

It’s my day off…

When I signed up for hosting the other day with Dreamhost they gave me a free domain name and I decided to go with 248pm.com.

So now I have 2:48AM and 2:48PM which is cool but I need to figure out what to do with the PM site. Any ideas?

Today we finally got over 100 users signed up in the forum. So far the forum has been exceeding my original expectations. As of this post there are 878 posts and 81 topics in the forum and on average there are 41 new posts a day. If you haven’t already checked the forum please do by clicking on the forum link on the top of the page or following this [Link]

Anyone here on a Windows PC having issues viewing this site? I was just checking it now using Virtual PC running Windows 2000 and IE5 and the site looks off. The right column with the search box and the sections seems squashed, plus the main buttons on top under the title also are not looking right. Anyone facing this same issue?

This is how the site should look like [Picture]

Today I decided I will discontinue posting porn on this blog. There are a couple of reasons for my decision but I think the main one is that porn is attracting a “different” kind of crowd to this blog. My Haifa and Nancy Ajram videos I posted awhile back were recently linked to by an Arab porn forum and I didn’t like that neither did I like some of the comments that were left, so I decided to delete those two posts. Then I realized, hey, why not just remove the rest of the porn, I don’t have that many porn posts anyway so very little will be missed. So starting Sunday the porn will be deleted. So make sure you help yourself to whatever is there now before its all gone. [Sex]

My aim of trying to hit over 5,000 unique visitors a everyday for February failed. It only hit over 5,000 six times with the highest being on 27th of February with 5,411 visitors. The lowest amount of visitors in one day was 4,415 and that was on February 10th. The average amount of visitors per day for February was 4,799 compared to 3,949 for January. The total amount of visitors in the month of February was 134,375 compared to January’s 122,430 (and February is 3 days shorter). For more details you can check the [Website Stats].

Well since the launch of the forum yesterday 28 users have registered and started posting. Thats more then I was expecting for the first day and I am hoping that number will grow a lot bigger once more topics get posted there. If you haven’t registered or checked out the forum already please do, I think it will turn into a great place where readers of this site can communicate with each other. [Link]

I just setup a forum for this site. I figured readers can hang out there, chat and discuss stuff. People new to Kuwait can also go in and ask questions if they have any and other users can answer them back. The forum is easy to use and I don’t think anyone should have any trouble using it. I placed a link in the top menu for easy access. Check it out. [Link]

January started off slow with January 1st getting only 2,605 visitors that day. Luckily that was also the lowest amount of visitors per day for the month. The highest was on January 27th when 8,081 visitors came to the site but that was with the help of Digg. Without the help of Digg, January 31st was the highest with 5,077 visitors visiting that day. The average visits per day for January was 3,949. The total visitors for the month of January was 122,430. The aim for the month of February is to keep the visitors per day at over the 5,000 mark. For more details you can check the [Website Stats].

Ok, the site update is now 99% complete. All the major stuff have been taken care of. Please do a hard refresh so that your browser loads up all the latest code and images. You can hard refresh by holding down the shift key and then hitting the reload button in your browser.