Search: “about the blog”

An interesting article that lists 10 points that help make a problogger. I personally have three points I follow: Post often, posts must be interesting, and posts must be short. [Link]

I was flipping through some blogs when I landed on Flippa X’s post on Burger Boutique. The post opened up my appetite and 30 minutes later I was at Burger Boutique having dinner. I thought that was pretty interesting because I don’t do that with magazines. I never read a food article in a magazine and then acted upon it. With blogs I have done it a bunch of times already. Although this might sound strange but I think the reason is I find blogs more credible then magazines, or should I say more real..

As a Star Trek TNG fan I find this really funny and cool.. [Link]

[source Kottke]

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].

I was just reading Zaydoun’s post on how he has been blogging for three years and it really brought back some good memories. You see, before it was just Zaydoun’s “Kuwait Unplugged” blog and qHate which was made up of me, Rampurple and Nibaq. qHate originally was Nibaqs idea and it started off as a blog about life in Kuwait but when the US decided to invade Iraq, qHate quickly turned into a war blog. We were posting on things that were going on in Kuwait like the sirens, the panics and the gas masks we even got the chance to stalk meet Wolf Blitzer and John Vause. It was a lot of interesting little things that showed people how everyone in Kuwait was living during this uncertain time. Checking my first post (2-2-03) now though I realized it was actually related to the war.. so now I am wondering if war blogging was part of the original plan… It was cool how me, Rampurple and Nibaq used to blog together in one blog and now we all have our own separate blogs. I keep telling Nibaq we were like a rock band that split up and all the members went solo.

In the end the site ended after we hit our peak, the war was over, there was barely anything to post about and only Rampurple was left posting and she finally also said goodbye. Maybe one day we will all be back together again, like a reunion..

Toot is like safat but instead of it focusing only on Kuwait Blogs, Toot focuses on all Arab blogs in the region.

The idea is good but I just haven’t been able to use Toot the way I use Safat. In Safat I scroll down the page reading a “post title” followed by reading a sentence or two from that post. If the post preview sounds interesting I open it in a new tab and continue reading the full post on that bloggers site.

With Toot I can’t do that since the only thing I see is the post title and the blog its from.. no post preview. Sure they have a section on the main page called tootreads but these are a few handpicked posts and they are not updated very often. Even the tootstream where all the latest post titles are displayed isn’t easy to use since the name of the blog is highlighted more then the post title itself. I would think the title of the post would be more important then the title of the blog since you are there to find new posts to read and not to read blog names. Another issue I have is with the voting system. If you like a certain blogger you can vote for them and give them a rating. The problem is its not an easy procedure, to vote you need to give them your email address and they will send you an email with a link to confirm your vote. They are doing this I am guessing to keep away cheaters but this isn’t a full proof plan and it makes voting a pain in the ass.

I do like the general visual theme of Toot and I really think Safat needs to get redesigned into something thats as appealing. Even the “new” Safatoo isn’t any better and if anything its a lot worse then the classic safat. Safat is lacking an identity and thats where Toot is succeeding the most. Anyway if you haven’t checked Toot out yet please do and tell them what you think. [itoot]

Chewbacca from StarWars has a weblog! [Link]

I just used Alexaholic to graph and compare traffic with my site and other Kuwait bloggers and I found the results interesting. It seems most of the time our traffic dips and peaks together. The Kuwaiti blogging community in a way is connected together which makes sense if you think about it. We all for example got more traffic when the Amir passed away since everyone abroad wanted to find out what was happening in Kuwait. We probably also got a dip in traffic during the vacation when many Kuwaiti students studying in the US came back to Kuwait and stopped checking the blogs. You can check out the chart and see what I am talking about by clicking the link below. You could also plug in your own blogs and check and compare. [Link]

Another celebrity who blogs to add to the list, Joe Rogan, the comedian who plays the handyman on the hit show NewsRadio has a blog. [Link]

Here is a list of other celebrities that blog:
David Duchovny (X-Files)
Rob Zombie (White Zombie)
Rosie O’Donnell (Talkshow)
Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher on StarTrek TNG)
Zach Braff (Scrubs)

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].

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].

Seems like Rocky is going the way of King Kong when it comes to pre-movie blogging. The Rocky Balboa blog recently came online and over the next year, Sylvester Stallone and the production team will talk about the making of the upcoming film Rocky Balboa. The site already contains a video and some pictures from the movie and from what I can see Stallone is back in shape but is really starting to look old. I heard that Mr. T is coming back for this Rocky movie, I hope thats true. I also hope that Stallone comes out with Rambo 4 soon, I would rather see Rambo over Rocky any day. Finally I also think Stallone should join Jack Bauer on ’24’, together they can do some serious ass kicking! [Link]

It seems whatever the problem was with blogspot and fasttelco is solved now. Fasttelco users can access blogspot without getting a timeout error.

November had the highest amount of unique visitors to this blog with a total amount of 66,815, over double the amount of September which was 26,319 unique visitors. The highest amount of unique visitors in one day was 6,450 and that was on the 15th of November when I got linked my Engadget. The lowest amount of visitors was 1,649 and that was on November 1st. The average amount of unique visitors per day is now over 3,000.

For more up-to-date stats you can click the Website Stats link on the bottom of the right hand side column.

Eric Spiekermann designer of my second favorite typeface Meta has a fucking blog! Most of his posts are posted in German and English which makes things easy for me since I neither speak nor read German. My favorite typeface is Frutiger by the way which was designed by Adrian Frutiger. A good friend of mine was very lucky to have met him at a design conference. When he was introduced to Adrian Frutiger he told him that Frutiger was his favorite typeface, Adrian replied asking him at what point size, my friend replied saying 9 ofcourse.

Anyway here is Eric’s blog. [Link]