As I am a google apps users myself, and chrome is my browser of choice, I found an amazing app which i think is a must have for anyone serious about using gmail/google apps on chrome.

So lets get right to it, this week’s app of the week goes to:

Rapportive

Rapportive is an amazing application, which replaces the google ads in your gmail browser when you open up an email, and instead shows you increadibly useful information about the person who emailed you.

It will search and find if they have a facebook, linked in or twitter account associated with their email address, and display their profiles for you to be able to either connect with them or find out further about them.

You can even save write and save private notes about them. For anyone who is interested in connecting further or finding out more about the people who email them, rapportive is a must have app.

Of course with the advancement of web technologies such as HTML5 and css3 and a whole bunch of other tools out there, it has really transformed what we though was possible to do online.

In fact, we are now beginning to expect even more from our online experience, that we sometimes forget just how far we have come.

Recently, I have found myself to have completely abolished desktop email clients. Yes thats right, I don’t open outlook and I don’t open my mac mail. The only time i will ever refer back to them is if for any reason, my internet connection dies out. The fact is, it is soo much easier to just view my email, chat with colleagues and keep ahead of my calendar events from the one browser window. It even loads faster then a desktop application and searches much better for old emails.

I am now even considering to stop using my office suite. Google docs for me has come such a long way from “its such a pain to edit my documents” to “wow, this looks and feels exactly my desktop application”.

I personally no longer carry a notebook with me anymore, all notes are taken and stored online, using the evernote.com application. It synchs between my imac, macbook and android phone. I don’t even need to think about where my notes are, or carrying around a usb with important information.

I think traditionally, we have always considered the cloud as a backup of our desktops.  But now, a desktop is merely a backup of the cloud.  We are looking to synch the cloud with our desktop rather than the opposite.

In fact, if you take the android phone as en example, all your phone contacts are retrieved from your google account.  This means that if you buy a new handset, your contacts are automatically imported to your phone. Magic.

Now of course, I dont think we will reach the extent of replacing our desktop applications all together, especially for heavier applications such as graphic editing suites, however for the majority of tasks, i think the cloud is the only place to be.

What are your thoughts?

If you invite people regularly, then you may be aware that there used to be a javascript code which you would simply paste into your address bar, click enter and magically all your contacts get selected!

Unfortunately the javascript method no longer works, as facebook keep making changes to their site, and attempt to reduce spam.

Not to worry though, there is a alternative out there, just follow these steps:

1. Download an install imacro for firefox, make sure you re-start firefox once installed.

2. Open up facebook, go to the event or fan page where you want to invite all your friends.

3. Scroll to the bottom of your friends list, so that all the pictures have loaded in the small pop up box.

4. Click on the imacro icon at the top of your toolbar (should be visible if you installed and re-started firefox).

5. Click on the record tab in your imacro. Now click record and then stop.

6. Now click load, and choose the select all macro which you downloaded.

7. Final step, go to the play tab, and click play.

Files Needed:

Once you complete the above steps the macro will automatically select all your friends one by one.  You can stop it at anytime when all your friends have been selected.

It is important to note, that even though you select all your friends, facebook only sends certain amount of invites at any given time, so you will need to run the macro a few times to send the invites to all your friends, depending on how many contacts you have.

It is still definitely a lot faster and easier than click, click, click.

The client requested that their website should look modern, and in-line with their new modern black and white branding.  Zaviya Advertising and Media W.L.L. were one of the first companies in the Kingdom of Bahrain to enter the Outdoor Advertising sector.  They have been around since the days where billboards were painted by hand instead of print! (No, i’m not joking)

Ammar Rasti, CEO of ZAC outdoor media, also had a vision of making the website more interactive, where potential advertisers could see every location available on a interactive map, in order to make it easier for advertisers to pick the locations they require. A new look, and a new way of doing business, means that traditional powerpoint presentations and location print outs are redundant.

Here are some screenshots of the project:       (you can visit the website at http://www.zac-bh.com)

What makes it even more difficult is that you tend to be extremely picky when designing for your own brand, hence I have gone through 5 or 6 re-designs of the actual concept.  As this has been an extremely frustrating journey, but one worth the wait, Mansour the head of web development at H2M clearly pointed out, you got to put something on the holding page, come up with an idea and just execute it.

So here it is, our new “coming soon” page (the actual site has also progressed very nicely, and should be launched soon – stay tuned!).  You can visit the site directly at http://www.h2monline.com

I have been running a web design company in Bahrain for the last year and half.  I have been heavily involved with social media groups and young enthusiastic dot com webpreneurs in the country.  And of course, I always have lengthy conversations with all clients and potential clients about their projects.

There is nothing that frustrates a big believer in the web industry such as myself, then looking around at local websites in the country, and in the region, to find that majority have not had as much success or recognition as they anticipated when they first started the project.

Why do we only have a handful of successful sites that you can count on your fingers?  Why is the online industry booming in all other parts of the world?  Is it because, we have a smaller population? Is it because we havent realized what language appeals to the masses in the region? Is it because people feel afraid to purchase online from local vendors? What is it exactly?

Whilst i could go into a bit more detail about why we are only starting to enter the online era in the region, which inevitability is coming,  i would like to dedicate this article to one particular aspect which i have seen time and time again, which I believe must be changed in order to reach success.

The golden rule which must be changed in the mindsets of our budding middle eastern webpreneurs, is that you should start by building something great, that people will want to use, before thinking of advertising!

I can’t tell you how many times, i have had a conversation or started a job, where we are designing and building ad space before we even complete the website itself.

Sure, making money from advertising is a great way to earn some extra income, however, unless people are visiting your site, engaging with your site, that ad space is pretty value-less.

“We must stop building websites around ad space concepts, and start building ad space around a successful website concept”

And if you are going to proceed with advertising, dont over-do it.  You can always tell when you have stumbled onto an arabian site, when you see a small bit of content, and 50 banners surrounding it.  You must always keep the visitors experience at the forefront of your mind, and not your advertising ambitions.  Advertisers come and go, but your visitors, once they leave you, it becomes a lonely lonely place in cyberspace.

Websites like Facebook, twitter and linked in, never introduced ads, till they were highly popular.  They build their sites around a concept that was “cool, useful, engaging” and then introduced ads when the time was right.

Think about your content, and your concept, and think of advertising only at the end.

And just to be clear, advertising is not the only source of income in a online model, charging for services could be a lot more valuable.  So think about the business model, paypal is now open for business in Bahrain, which means, the dot com world is your oyster.

As you may know, being a tourist or even a resident in London, you are more than likely to be a heavy user of the public transportation system.  This could be due to the incredibly high cost of motor insurance, the sky high cost of petrol, paying a congestion charge just to drive into the heart of the city, or the ridiculously expensive and rare parking spots.  Whatever the reason may be, even if you own a car in the city, you will probably find yourself taking a bus or train ride every now and again.

The last time I had been in London, we thought we had smart phones, but obviously not the smart phones we know today.  Taking a simple journey on the underground, and looking at the passengers sitting in the coach with you, you quickly notice something.

Gone are the days where people would read a book, a newspaper, or simply listen to their ipod or any other mp3 player, as they attempt to entertain themselves whilst praying that time would magically pass by as they get to their destination.

Today, all you see, are iphones, android phones, ipads and other forms of tablet pc’s.  It is safe to say, the world has smoothly transitioned to a smart tech era.  Whilst we in Bahrain, also own all these gadgets, we never really appreciate the value of mobile apps, as we dont really have a public transport system which we need to use.

Most the world however, not only use public transport systems on a daily basis, but they also spend alot of time in them, due to the shear size of their cities, in contrast to our tiny island.

It is no wonder, that a simple game like Angry Birds generated 70 million dollars just from one of their games.  People are now relying more on their mobile devices and spending less time on normal desktop computers in order to take care of their daily communication and entertainment needs.

I must admit, that I never valued and appreciated my phone as much as I did when I was in London.  A sneaky game of Angry Birds, followed by communicating on my social networks and even using the built in navigation to find my way to the little boutique store that  sold me a authentic Arsenal Jersey for my 2 year old son with his name printed on it.

Whilst we may just be realizing the extent of the power and popularity of mobile apps, the rest of the world has already decided that this is truly a multi-billion dollar industry …

I would like to wish each and every one of you a happy Eid Mubarak, and pray that you all receive health, wealth, prosperity and anything else that it is you seek.

Enjoy your Eid Holidays everyone!

Generally, the easiest way to set up wordpress in arabic would be to simply install the arabic version of wordpress, and then everything is in RTL automatically.  However, if you are like me, and your arabic is generally weak, you will find one huge problem with doing this.  The wordpress admin panel will be fully in arabic.  And unlike other cms solutions out there, you will find no default switch to change languages to english for the admin side in the wordpress control panel.

So what is the solution?  Do you simply memorise and assume what each button does?  No, there is a simple solution, to do all your developement in the english wordpress, and once you are finished, if the client requires the admin to be in arabic, you simply switch the default language to arabic.

Just follow these simple steps:

1) Develop your wordpress website as per normal in english.  Ensure that you develop your theme in arabic though, by having the text go RTL.

2) Download the latest version of wordpress in arabic from http://ar.wordpress.org.

3) In the wp-content folder of the arabic wordpress download, you will find a folder called languages.  Copy the languages folder to your wp-content folder in your main english wordpress installation.

4) Edit your wp-config.php file in the root of your installation and add look for the language setting, and change this to arabic:

“ar” being the name of the language we found in the plugin folder.

And that’s it, if you login to your admin now, you will notice it is all in arabic and layed out from Right to Left.

If you need to switch back to english at any time, you can simply remove the “ar” from the wp-config.php file.

So how can we achieve the same thing in joomla? In joomla you will notice that you may face the same issue, as previously described in the wordpress version of this post. You manually place the addthis code into your site, you view your articles in either section blog or category blog view, and when you click share, you notice that is sharing the blog page, rather than the article in question.

Okay so lets get right into the fix.

To manually place the addthis code into your websites category blog view, just go to components/com_content/views/category/tmpl/blog_item.php and open up the file for editing.

Place the addthis code in the relevant section where you want the plugin to appear.

Now this time, we are going to ammend the first link of the addthis code by pointing it to the correct url, and we will assign the title of the article to be shared aswell:

So our full code depending on the services you are using, will look something like this: