It has been 4 months since I put Google ads on my site, and so far the result are rediclousy funny, I only earned $4 🙂 , I didn’t expect to get anything at all, and even if I did I doubt that they will send to Saudi Arabia.

Today, I noticed an ad that I didn’t like and it appeared very frequently, so I decided to block it, fortunately Google have a mechanisim for that but it will take some time, so I decided to switch from text ads to image ads, and change the location of the banner to better place, and I will wait to see how it will affect my earnings.

Thunderbird is a great email client, it has very good support for international languages, and it displays Arabic emails without any problems, the only problem that I face with it is when writing Arabic emails, unfortunately Thunderbird doesn’t have shortcut or button to change the writing direction from left-to-right used by most western languages, to right-to-left used for Arabic.

But through the power of extensions you can install this small extension (37K) that will add 2 new buttons in Compose window, one for changing the direction from LTR->RTL, and vice versa.

Alriyadh Newspaper is giving away 25 one year subscription, one subscription for each game day in FIFA world cup 2006, all you need to do is to guess the result of each match, of course the more matches you get correct the more chance for you to win, to vote go to alriyadh world cup site http://www.alriyadh.com/worldcup/, and it is absolutely free, no need for 5 SR SMS to subscribe, and if you get the result right you really have good chance to win.
Update:
“All” correct guesses will get 50% discount on Arliyadh Newspaper subscription, so it will become 300SR instead of 600SR.

While upgrading WordPress to version 2, I backed up my database and I noticed that the comments table size is around 1.7MB which is huge, I don’t have that many comments. I find out that WordPress don’t delete comments even if they were marked spam, so I deleted them manually, so go check your comments table and save some space.

WP1 Spam detection:
WordPress 1.x has a feature that mark comments as spam if they match certin keywords, it was doing very good job, except for that last few weeks I start getting new spam comments so I had to update my spam keywods.

These days Internet backbone in Saudi Arabia is having many problems affecting mainly DSL customers in some areas. I guess it must be related to the boom in new DSL connections.

To make things worst the school vacation just started and the Internet browsing became very very slow.

Thank god that I host my website at SAUDI NET so no speed prolem with it.

Today I had to finish writing some code for Alriyadh Worldcup web site, and I was expecting it to take at least 5 to 6 hours, and it had to be finished today, so I planned all my evening for that coding session

Fortunately I finished the job in 2 hours, and I had some extra time in my hand, so I decided to do something I planned to do for very long time, upgrade WordPress, so I sat down and upgrade it from version 1.5 to the latest version, alhamdu lelah the upgrade process was very smoth, althogh some features didn’t work, mainy the rich text editing feature.

These sites collect links to CSS designed websites, great if you want to get some inspiration, it also give some idea on the capabilities of CSS:

• css thesis: sites, that’s all
• CSS Import
• CSS Beauty
• Unmatched style

Alriyadh.com launched a new website for covering the FIFA world cup 2006, the website can be found here http://www.alriyadh.com/worldcup.

The new site isn’t a regular news website, it is a new web application specifically designed for the world cup, it would be also updated in real time, i.e. you can follow any match events while it is still in play, of course you will still find regular coverage like news, and photos.

Until now my downloads are basically similar to Windows counter part:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Real Player
• Windows Mediaplayer
• Windows Messenger

any thing else I should look at.

Last Tuesday, I enabled Geylisting on SAUDI NET mail servers, and you can see the decrease of spam we are getting (the blue line):

The first day of enabling greylisting we got many complaints about delayed emails, but after that all emails flow with delays.

To learn more check Greylist @ Wikipedia