When will the Hour be established?

Category: Islam -

Picture below is an aerial view of Dubai City. As you can see the buildings are literally above the clouds. Just a few hundred years ago, Dubai and the whole of Arabian peninsula was just a desert. During that time, all you see was some mud houses, bedouins and camels. But now… this!

dubai_clouds.png

When I saw it I couldn’t help but remember the prophecy of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). He was asked a question by angel Jibril (Gabriel): “When will the Hour be established?”, in other words when is the Judgment Day.

Prophet said:“… When the shepherds of black camels start boasting and competing with others in the construction of higher buildings. And the Hour is one of five things which nobody knows except Allah.” (Volume 1, Book 2, Hadith No:47)

Subhan’Allah, what a vivid description of the above picture by the prophet.

This was prophesied more than 1,400 years ago. And it’s just one of many prophecies of prophet Muhammad (pbuh) regarding the coming of the Last Day, including the Second Coming of Prophet Isa (Jesus).

The Hour is indeed near!

Gmail: How to find all “unread” messages in “inbox”

Category: Tips -

I have just done a cleanup of my Gmail inbox. For the first time it’s showing “2 Unread Messages” andinbox_unread.png not “100+ Unread Messages“.

How do I feel? Feel like I had a haircut after 6 months, no no, feel like I just shaved my head ;) Yeah it’s that good to see so few unread messages in my Gmail.

Two little Gmail search strings and a lot of courage helped me to achieve this result. A lot of courage – because some of the emails I intentionally marked “unread” so that I could reply to them when I have a spare time. But the spare time somehow never came ;) and by now, it was too late to reply to them anyway.

As for the two little search strings, they were:

  1. is:unread for listing unread messages.     2)   in:inbox for listing messages in inbox

Used together as is:unread in:inbox in the search field, it will list all the unread emails in your inbox.

Other Useful Search Strings

Here are some of the other useful gmail search strings that you can use:

  • Emails from particular sender
    from:ades or from:ades@adesblog.com – so you can use either the sender’s name or email.
  • Search for emails in particular label
    in:label – just like above I used “in:inbox”, you can search for emails with any other labels.
  • Emails CC’ed or BCC’ed to someone
    cc:arstan – it will search for emails that were CC’ed to Arstan. (Similarly you can use bcc:arstan).
  • Search for chat messages
    is:chat – is:chat advertise – it will look for any chat message that contains the word “advertise” in it.
  • Emails that are read, unread and starred
    is:read – is:unread – is:starred – it will search for emails that are read, unread and starred respectively. Please note that you can combine more than one search string. Eg; is:starred is:unread from:ades
  • Emails with specific subject title
    subject:adsense – finds emails with a word “adsense” in their subject.
    subject:(google adsense) – finds emails in which the subject contains both the word “google” AND “adsense”.
    subject:”google adsense” – finds emails in which the subject contains a phrase “google adsense” in them. Phrases like “adsense google” or “google has adsense” won’t be found.
  • Emails that contain attachment
    has:attachment – search for messages with an attachment. Eg; from:ades has:attachment
  • Emails with specific attachment
    filename:fonts.zip – search for messages that has attachment fonts.zip.

Memorize the above search strings and you will never lose an email in your Gmail ever again! Hope you find it useful.

Don’t be discouraged by the numbers

Category: Blogging, Islam -

Human beings (accept for the prophets, i will tell you the story after the post) are affected by the results of our actions, I guess that’s our nature. If we relate it to blogosphere, it’s all about traffic, RSS subscribers, number of comments blog posts etc. Bloggers get happy when their blogs’ traffic increase, when their comments on the posts increase and their RSS subscribers increase… etc.

And opposite is true, when the traffic decreases, the number of comments decreases and RSS subscribers drop, bloggers get upset and demoralized. Eventually they may even abandon their blogging because of the declining stats.

My advice is “don’t bother about the numbers!”. (Yes, I know it’s easier said than done but…) Just do what you have to do (i.e blogging) and keep blogging, don’t bother about those stats. Because if you are good at what you do, you will eventually succeed.

I guess in order not to be bothered much about the stats, you need to overcome a certain barrier. In my view this barrier consists of thoughts like: I have too few readers. My traffic is too low for me to succeed in blogging. What will people say if i write in certain manner? I have to write/behave/attend conferences like “top bloggers” to be accepted by others…etc

Reason for the discouragement

Usually one of the main reasons for the discouragement is, it’s when you blog for the wrong reasons. People blog for various reasons, and if you blog for specific reason like “making money online” only. Then, there is a high probability that you will stop blogging when you hit the bottom. In other words, when your blog stops making money, you won’t see any reason to continue blogging.

Of course, it depends on the projects. Sometimes you launch a project just to make money. So, when the project doesn’t make money, it’s better to just discontinue the project.

High traffic doesn’t mean more comments

I just want to give an example that high traffic doesn’t always mean more comments on every post. For example, ReadWriteWeb is a huge blog that has more than 200 thousand RSS subscribers (see screenshot).

rww.gif

But look how many comments each blog-post gets on RWW (see screenshot below). Not many! So if you have few hundred or few thousand RSS subscribers, and do not get much comments – don’t sweat!

rww_comments.gif

So, if RWW with its 200+ thousand RSS subscribers, on average getting less than 10 comments per post, then by right your posts shouldn’t get any comments at all! ;) Just kidding. But you got the point right!? Don’t be worried if your posts are not getting any comments.

The Story

So, back to the story that I promised in the beginning of this post. Prophets are not bothered by the results, nor by the number of their followers (no matter how numerous or how few the number of their followers are), neither by the effectiveness of their calling. They have just one task to do – and that is to convey the message. Nothing more. Because it’s in Allah’s (The God) hands who should be guided and who shouldn’t be.

For example, prophet Hud (Eber in Hebrew) peace be upon him, preached years and years to his people. However, the only response he got was the rejection from his people (most of the prophets including Isa (Jesus) peace be upon him was rejected by his own people).

After years has passed, the people of Hud even demanded saying:

They said, “Have you come in order to turn us away from our gods? Then bring upon us the calamity with which you threaten us, if you are telling the truth!” Quran 46.22

You see? prophet of Allah didn’t get discouraged by the response of his people. Instead he was patient and continued his calling to the Truth. But it was his people who grew inpatient and demanded that the punishment be brought upon them. So God punished them as they wished.

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) had also said that, there will be a prophet on the Judgment Day with 10 followers, and there will be a prophet with five followers, and 3, and 2, and 1. And there would be a prophet with no follower whatsoever!

Can you imagine a prophet who has been calling people to the Truth all of his life and didn’t get any result? We get discouraged if our blog’s traffic drops, or get negative comments or if few people unsubscribe from our RSS… and most of us even give up if particular thing that we are doing doesn’t bear any results within a short period of time.

In worldly terms, these prophets with few or no followers would be defined as the losers. But Allah has called them in the Quran that they were the real victorious ones. And the real losers were the community who rejected these prophets. Because ultimately it’s the prophets who will be in the highest level of Paradise, and the people who rejected them will be in the depths of Hellfire.

In Conclusion

So, the moral of the story (and this post) is: So what if you lost few RSS subscribers, of if your traffic declined?! Don’t bother about these little things. As long as you love what you are doing, just continue doing. Don’t bother what people will think of you or what will they say..etc. You are better than that!

P.S Remember, majority is not always correct! And you do not have to fit in to majority’s demands, lifestyle, thinking…etc in order to be successful.

Note: Don’t get it wrong. It doesn’t mean that you do not bother about marketing, SEO, frequency of your posts, consistency of your posts…etc. Instead, you must use all the available options and ways to make your blog successful. It just means that, when you see negative results, you shouldn’t be bothered by them. Just keep doing what you are doing! And you will be fine.

Learning from mistakes – Story of Daud AS

Category: Blogging, Islam -

Two brothers came to Prophet Daud (peace be upon him) (Prophet David in Bible) and said

“Judge between us, we are in dispute”.

One of them said

“This is my brother. He has ninety nine sheep and I have one sheep. He is now forcing me to give up my single sheep to him”.

So, prophet Daud without listening to the other brother said

“He has undoubtedly wronged you in demanding to add your single sheep to his flock. He should return your sheep to you!”.

Once he has delivered his judgment, two brothers disappeared into the air. Propet Daud realized that these were two angels and that he was just tested by God and that he made a mistake — he didn’t listen to both sides of the story before delivering his judgment.

So, he fell prostrating asking for forgiveness from God. And God forgave him. (Quran 38:21-25)

When mufassireen (interpreters) of Quran talk about this story they say that Daud after the mistake was a better Daud than before the mistake. In other words, after the mistake he was wiser and more knowledgeable than before.

Moral of the story:

Mistakes can be a great source of knowledge if we derive lessons from them, and learn from them.

About a month ago, problogger posted a blog-post on his blog asking readers “What is the biggest mistake you have made as a blogger?“. I am not sure if you have read this post and comments under it. There are over 200 comments where readers share their mistakes as a blogger and how their mistakes affected their blog negatively (directly or indirectly).

So, if you haven’t read it, go to the page and go through the comments. There are a lot of lessons to be learnt for everyone.

Paying attention to the right stuff, and learning how to sacrifice

Category: Startups -

Update: This came to be known as Lean Startup, popularized by Eric Ries in late 2008.

prioritize.png Last week in my MBA class (Management Control Systems) I had a case-study about “Balanced Scorecard” and how it was implemented in a particular company in the banking industry. Obviously the company had a lot of challenges and issues during the BSC implementation.

One of the lessons from the case was, for the BSC to be implemented successfully and fully, you need to keep improving it as the implementation phase moves along. One of the reasons cited for BSC implementation failure was because some companies want a perfect BSC – from the start. But that’s not possible, since BSC is a continuous thing, which has to be improved, changed, and adjusted over time.

Relating it to web-projects and Startups

This case-study reminded me of few occasions where I noticed how some people want everything to be perfect. They pay attention to the wrong (or shall we say less important) parts of the project. Every project consists of different parts, if it is a web project for example, then it could be divided into design, development, choosing hosting, choosing domain name, marketing, advertising etc.

However in order for the work to begin, you only need design and development (i.e scope of work) first. So don’t waste your time thinking how you will promote the website after its completion. Similarly, if you just want to test the waters whether the project will work or not, then don’t delve too much on the design of the interface. Just get a functional user interface that will do the job fairly and see if your project will stand the test. Because I noticed that some people will spend so much time perfecting the design of the website that they delay the launch of the project, or even worse the project gets not launched at all.

Because in most cases, it’s not the user interface that determines if the project will work or not. It’s the IDEA that determines the fate of your project. If your idea is good, then even if your website is not that “good looking” – it will still work! But not vice versa. You might have the best designed website, but still fail.

Lessons to be learned

So, in conclusion; first prioritize your tasks, identify the parts that are most important for the project to be completed. Once you have identified, work on those important parts first. Don’t waste your time on the tasks that will follow after the project has been completed.

Secondly, try to learn how to sacrifice on the design. Yes great logo is important for the brand, but don’t search for it for months until you delay the project. Same goes with the design of the website, some people spend so much time on the design that the real objective of the project gets forgotten.

Assessing Your Blog’s Strategic Competitiveness

Category: Blogging, Tips -

In strategic management, in order to have a sustainable competitive advantage in a resource based view, you need to have a resource(s) that are valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and difficult to substitute. If your resource has all of the above mentioned characteristics, then you can be sure to have a sustainable competitive advantage, at least for some time. Because sooner or later your competitors will start to imitate. And if you do not keep innovating, your competitive advantage will be short lived really really fast.

How can we relate this view to blogging? Well, blogging needs a strategy too. And you can easily find where you are in terms of your competitiveness against the other fellow bloggers with this table. Based on your answers you can find your competitiveness level on the right.

rbs.png

Of course, you should be targeting for the all-red line – sustainable competitive advantage. In other words, if you are in all-red, it means that your posts are

  • beneficial to the readers,
  • they are difficult to find on other blogs,
  • your writing style is unique (difficult to copy),
  • you have a personality that is charismatic
  • you have an expertise in certain field that nobody else has.

If you find yourself anywhere in 1 to 3, then you should identify where you are lagging behind, and then come up with a strategy to target that weakness. Of course, if anyone is in the 1st line (competitive disadvantage) then he/she is just wasting his/her time with his/her blog. Because if you are in competitive disadvantage, you better do something really fast or just stop blogging.