Q8Ba7th Official Blog

A very close friend of mine have finally joined the world of blogosphere. Being the hardcore gamer I know he is, I wasn’t expecting this type of blog from him that I had to read it twice to realize it’s true. Though the cause is noble, and I thought of extending the invitation to others who want to join and have a similar journey.

TheJourney.me is a blog documenting a Kuwaiti man’s journey to a better body. How many of us complain from unhealthy bodies? How many of us really act on it? And most importantly, for how long? The purpose of the blog is to keep pushing him self forward, now that his journey is being watched by everyone. When there is an eye watching, you feel more motivated to move forward.

If you like to join such a journey, see if the site content appeals to you. It will the least put you alert to what you feed your body. After all, “You are what you eat!”.

Popularity: 2% [?]

To make it more live and news updated, we are testing automatic news importing from popular news sources. Yesterday we added local, economy, sport, , and worldwide news from Al-Jarida newspaper. We have are also adding the famous TechCrunch posts to the Technology section, so expect to find interesting things there. While the automatic news import might bring an overwhelming amount of unwanted news, all these news will be queued in the Upcoming News section. News that gets enough votes only will make it to the published popular section. What’s even better is, all those news are categorized accordingly. So if you have a taste for Sport, browse to the Sport section from the top navigational header and you will only get what you need.

We hope you like the new feature, and wish to hear your feedback on it.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Following the successful raid on spammers last night, we are happy to release the new design for Q8igg, which we hope you will find much more user friendly, and easier to navigate and utilize. The new design comes with the following advantages:

1- New Featured Gallery News
2- Easier navigation to different news and categories
3- 3 column view - you get more options at same page in one simple layout
4- RSS Feeds for your preferred category. For example, you can chose to subscribe to Kuwait Sites feed rather than News, or say Sports only.

The design has just been released, fresh out, so it may have bits of glitches here and there. Please bare with us, and do no hesitate to report any problems or suggestions you have.

Hopefully, we still have more cool things to come. So keep looking. Until then, start sharing and casting your vote to your favorite piece of news, article, or sites you find in Kuwait or worldwide.

Hope you like it.

Regards,
Bashar

Popularity: 9% [?]

Due to the high amount of spam attacks it got, the Q8igg project has been put a side for quite long time. However the project for me was everything but doomed. I was waiting for the right time and tool to fix this, and during that time, the site’s been literally unusable.

Last night was the diet and health gaining night. All new members are required to do email authentication now, and we are monitoring closely for spammers. Also, a counter-attack has been launched on all the happily living spammers over the course of previous months. As a result, the following actions has been executed:

1- Over 13,500 spammers have been deleted.
2- Over 8,500 spam posts were deleted
3- Over 7,500 spam votes removed
4- All spammer comments were deleted

I’m sure there are still bits and pieces of spammers here and there, but as far as news goes, the site is clean now, and we are back with a reasonable amount of users (47 as of now). I have also worked very hard to filter our legitimate users from spammers, I hope none was removed by mistake. If you have been positively contributing in the past, did not have your stories removed, or if you just keep silent but I know you from the blogs, it is very unlikely you have been deleted.

Still however, if your account has been deleted by mistake, I strongly apologize for this unintended action. With my apology again, you are kindly welcome to register again, and start using the site as before. It’s really difficult to filter out one individual amongst thousands of spammers, so I hope you understand.

Also, story submission time has been optimized as it was taking long time for spam filtering.

These are first steps of things we have in mind to bring the community back live again.

Popularity: 9% [?]

OK, so Al-Qabas is definitely not a new site, and I haven’t been there for a while, but I noticed only today their new design. The design is not really a breakthrough or anything, but compared to the old one, it’s much more compelling, easy to use and browse, helps you find what you are looking for. I can tell some thought has been put into the layout. The usability of the site as I see now is better than any other local news site. I liked the new dynamic tab browsing for subcategory. No page refresh needed. For example, you can click on Worldwide Sport under Sport category. Latest news will show up in that area without refreshing the current page.

The Bad:

1- RSS Feeds: First, RSS Feeds are not embedded in the headers. Something which could make it easier for browsers to identify and subscribe to the feed. Also, the feed titles are pointing to some urls like http://www.alqabas-kw.comarticle.aspx/?id=409408, which takes you to a 404 Page Not Found.

2- Cross Browser Support: At least on my Firefox @ Linux, which relatively often fails proper rendering to be honest, this site minorly fails with some text exceeding it’s box area, and top menu items are broken:

3- Continuous loading: For some reason, I see the page trying to load some content every few seconds. I doubt there is such instant news update on the site, so I wonder what’s that loading for. Sometimes its trying to load from Alqabas.com.kw, and others from doubleclick. So I’m assuming it’s some ad block trying to load.

Popularity: 11% [?]

For golden number fans, or also for people looking to buy a new normal number, Q8Numbers could be your first destination to check. A side from selling phone models and internet accessories, their main strong feature is the ability to search for your desired number, and see it’s availability. You can search for numbers by two ways:

1- Search by number pattern, e.g. I want numbers like 9**0000
2- Search by category: I want Golden Zain numbers ranging at this price.

Search results give you most information you need like number, owner, credit, line type, and contact number for inquiry. If you are looking for a number that matches yours, you can send a query to them and they will try to get it it seems. There is a section for advertisement as well if you like to place banner ads or advertise your number. I didn’t quite understand what they mean by “thabet” and “motaharek”. If they are referring to land and mobile lines, I think 5 KD charge for advertising regular number kills the purpose. But then again, if my number is regular, I will usually just cancel it.

Nice To Have: I think a neat feature the site could have is anonymous number price estimate. I fill in the number I may wish to sell, or buy, and see the estimated price tag based on the nature of number, is it ranked as Golden, Diamond, regular. How did such previous numbers sell. This could help people decide whether they want to sell or not before broadcasting their number to the public.

So what sort of numbers do you expect to find there?

Opinion: I like the general idea of the site, I see a good use for it, though I’m not a big fan of luxurious numbers, so I won’t be doing serious hunting there. I believe people will save my number and are likely to forget it after that. Heck I forgot the number I bought to my wife!. I know it’s not like that, but I look at it as my IP. Doesn’t matter how it looks, if it works well :). Alas, the service keeps getting worse, so it doesn’t!

Popularity: 12% [?]

Careerjet.ae is the UAE version of the worldwide job search engine Careerjet.com. In their words “Careerjet is an employment search engine for the United Arab Emirates. It allows you to search a growing selection of jobs listed on company sites as well as jobsites in one go saving you the trouble of having to go to each site individually.”. So if this is a UAE Job Search why am I listing it here?

It’s because they also include jobs from around the middle-east, and a section for Kuwait job listing as well. Their search service is pretty fast you don’t want to stop. And they seem to be an ad powered site, so your individual use of the service is FREE.

Since they fetch the job listing automatically from companies and job listing sites, there is a chance of error ofcourse. I have seen some job listings in Kuwait section that do not belong to Kuwait. But still, the percentage is not that high and you can use it to seek your job easily. Site owners told me also they are bringing a Kuwaiti dedicated domain as well, after which things should be better for Kuwait job search, since it’s more focused.

Popularity: 22% [?]

So much information you need to look for out there, and a single window is just not enough. You frequently have to open more and more tabs to do more and more searches. And sometimes, when searching for local piece of information about Kuwait, you end up with an overwhelming amount of results from all over the planet that makes it difficult to reach the information you need, which is only inside Kuwait. This is why Q8Ba7th was made. Q8Ba7th is a Kuwait focused search engine powered by Google, that intends to make your Kuwait searches easier, giving you more relevant and focused results. This is opposed to searching the whole web when your search is aimed at only few hundreds or thousands of sites. But people often ask, why wouldn’t I Google the information I need directly? Google is more global and I can definitely find what I need there. The site I’m looking for may not be listed at Q8Ba7th.

This was one thing we thought of when we implemented the new interface. Another thing we aimed for was ease and quick of search. Ability to reach various amount of information, without needing for the browser to refresh. Something that will make the search experience smooth rather than discontinuous.

We’re happy to be releasing the new AJAX advanced search mash-up interface, that would give you literally 7 search results in one page:

If you click the link, or take a look at the image above, you would see two tabbed columns there:

Left Column: Kuwait Results - Q8Ba7th. That includes

• Kuwait: Search Kuwait sites
• Phones: Search Contact pages and phone directory pages of Kuwait sites. This is useful when you are looking for specific phone number, say EUREKA.

Right Column: Global Results. These are Google results that covers:

• Web: Normal Google web search. So now you can search what you want on Q8Ba7th, and see if Google Web results have anything useful as well.
• News: Google News Search. See what are the latest news on the topic you are searching for, like elections for example.
• Blog: Google Blog Search. Includes Blogspot alongside other professional blogs
• Image: Image search results for your query. Sometimes an image is worth a thousand words they say.

So that’s six resultsets. Where is the seventh? It’s the video bar below, giving you YouTube videos related to your search query. That’s gotta be worth more than a thousand words I say!

If you prefer the old classic mode, you can find a link at the top right to switch back to Classic mode. Also, below each resultset, you can click the More Results link to browse more results in Classic mode.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Name: Ketaaby.com

Type: Shopping - Books

Description: Kuwait online shopping bookstore that offers wide range of Arabic focused books with an English books section as well. The site is divided into one level of categories, e.g. computers, law, literature, English, but there are no subcategories. Home delivery is made within 48 hours of order placement, and it would seem that payment is in cash on delivery, which I personally like.

Pros:

FREE Delivery: I think the site needs an FAQ section as I was not able to find direct answer, but upon trying to checkout with 6 KD book, it showed the delivery charge as zero KD, which is good.

Regional: This is both good and bad, but looking at it from the bright side, the store is good for Arabic readers who prefer to read Arabic books only. It has a collection of English books, but their top seller majority is in Arabic.

Design: The look and feel of the site is appealing I find it and easy to load, focused and not cluttered with ads or anything else.

Unique: We really lack good large bookstores in Kuwait, and we lack online bookstores even more. The other online bookstore I know is Q8Books, which I discussed before. So I wish to see growth for them. Problem is, I don’t think Kuwaities in general are passionate enough about books to make strong market for them.

Cons:

Price: When I say this here, I am comparing English books at Amazon and local stores to this one. Usually novels are few KDs, could reach 5 KD at times. An example I looked at is “The Zahir”, which costs at Amazon $11, and local stores around 5 KD, while here it’s 8.5 KD. Novels are usually low priced, and light in weight, so shipping from outside the book would cost 3 KD, add another 3 KD for the shipping, you are still saving 2.5 KD. Ofcourse you are also waiting few days more. For some other books, the price may be a good offer though looking at book weight, or for Arabic books as well which you can’t find outside. So for your type of books, you should first take a look at the market and see if the difference is worth the trip to the store next time.

Categories: Having only one level of categories could make it difficult to find the book you are looking for. For example, in computer section I could be looking for software books purely. In English category, novels, history, biography, self-improvement and all other kinds are mixed together. It’s nice in a sense to browse through different collections, but not very helpful when you are looking for something specific. I think a better way would be to have same categories in English & Arabic. Or make it vice versa. When clicking on Computer, give option to include English, Arabic or both. Just a thought.

Search: The search feature did not seem to function as expected to me. I tried several searches for author and title, the results did not seem relevant.

Up to date?: Looking at my taste of books, computers, I did not see them so much updated. Maybe it’s because Arabic computer books are just not so updated, possible. I remember a big physical computer bookstore in Kuwait City that kept begging for customers till it went broke. Problem is, most computer book readers are welling to order from outside, and it’s difficult for local ones to compete with outside stores. I also notice this in Jarir Bookstore. But for Guinness World Records book, I can’t really excuse not having latest one :).

Suggestions: I hope the store is doing good, but I’m not sure. I am sure though I do not see enough ads for it. People in Kuwait are ordering good amount of books from outside, are increasingly facing more difficulties with delivery couriers, so if local stores can deliver in 2 days, which is long for local delivery but still good compared to international one, then they would happy to buy the same book if it’s for a good price. Some targeted Google ads, or Facebook ads might be useful. Have it been tried before? I’m not sure I’ve seen it

Popularity: 30% [?]

Name: Kuwait Boat Show International KBSI - 2008

Description: Second international boat show in Kuwait, with tens of specialized companies showing their latest products ranging from yachts, boats, marine engines, tools, equipments, and jet skies.

Location: Fahaheel Waterfront - Al Kout

Dates: 29th April - 3rd May

Time: 4 PM - 10 PM Daily

Ticket Price: 3 KD - I also saw 10 KD sign for VIP. No idea what’s the difference

Exhibitors: Click here.

The Good: For people who like sailing, sea sport, and boats, this is a very good chance to take a broader look at what’s available out there.

The Bad: The fountain area these days is so much condensed with boats you can’t enjoy the view anymore. Also, the place is more crowded, so a set at a cafe won’t guarantee nice and quite time. On a a side note, majority of visitors were foreigns.

Gallery:

Popularity: 29% [?]