Next Tuesday, June 26th 2007 we’ll meet at Dubai Marina Towers Walk, in Hakawati cafe starting at 8:00PM, so if you are a Rubyist, a Railer or just interested in Ruby or Rails, stop by and join us, the more we are, the more fun it’s going to be.

In any project and in every company during the planning stage, the owners and the creators start by studying the markets and see the benefits of each one in order to decide their target.

Now talking about web business, markets aren’t the same as in other businesses, we have a different kind of globalization in cyberspace, better communication facilities and a much wider audience, which leave us finally to the users judgment, the users who have too many options and choose only what best fits their needs.

Local Market

Local market, which is in my scenario the Middle East in general, and UAE in particular is one of the most fresh online markets right now, a gold mine, a lot of open opportunities, many ideas to be implemented and different kind of problems that have to be solved, but still there are many difficulties that every local web startup is facing, sometimes it’s the monopoly between the big local web firms, and sometimes it’s the misunderstanding of the real needs of the local internet user.

Replicating and Translating

Most of the local web applications currently are either being translated or replicated from another international successful web applications, I could rarely find a really creative competitive idea in here, something that is made for the specific requirements of the local market, not just a replication of what’s out there.

Local startups have this wrong impression that if an idea has worked globally and internationally then it have to and will work here too, but unfortunately this is not the case, if the web application does not support the local language (Arabic for example) or doesn’t have too many users from the local market, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be reimplemented or translated, maybe it means that it’s not made for our needs in the first place.

When we’re talking about the local market we should do something that fit our needs and solve our problems not just follow the hype and see what can be re-done just to simulate the same success story of an international replica.

Lack of Knowledge

One of the problems in the local market is the lack of knowledge of the cyberspace basics, I’m not saying that there is NOBODY who knows about Web2.0 or the new trends for example, but I’m talking about the percentage of those who know to all other local internet users..

How many of those who heard about these trends do really understand the meaning, for example few days ago I received one of these yahoo groups email circulars, that has “Jewels of Knowledge” as its subject and one of these jewels was: “What programming language is GOOGLE developed in?” and at the end of the email the answer was “Google is written in Asynchronous java-script and XML, or its acronym Ajax”. This is just an example of the low level of knowledge circulated and its lack of accuracy.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which programming language Google used, but in the other hand such level of knowledge should be raised, so the local internet users get a better understanding of what’s available and what they can get instead of just recycling what’s made for them and accept anything only because there is no alternatives.

Educating the internet users isn’t easy, and to give the right information is something very crucial, one of the most successful tries I’ve seen so far is Serdal a blog by Abdullah Al-Muhairi who has done a great job, writing and lecturing in Arabic about the new trends, demonstrating and explaining most of the new technologies, we need more of these tries, at least to build a solid knowledge background for the user to let him see what’s available and ask for more, ask for better.

The knowledge of the end user encourages the competition and makes the market more healthier, look at the Japanese market for example, the high level of basic internet knowledge every user have, they are always asking for more, and the competition became really harder, which made their products and services more enhanced and better shaped to give the users better satisfaction and more real solutions.

Low Level of Competition

Competition is the best motive to improve ourselves, you want to be better than your competitors so you start improving your products and skills, the more competition there is in the market the more healthier it is, and the better and competitive products and services will be.

Locally the competition is very low, sometimes it’s due to the outdated skills available and sometimes due to the monopoly of the big companies, those companies that insist on hiding the “lamp” and always trying to convince us that the “candle” is the only available mean of light.

There were and still are many tries to do something new, fighting all the way to deliver the best solutions available, but yet they are very few, few to the level that they are hard to find, I really find these tries very positive and sure they will be the pioneers or the local market and hopefully they will be more soon.

I hope the local market will reach the level of tough competition to have a better and healthier market, which will encourage us to join and compete by trying to deliver a better solutions instead of just being the first to copy these solutions from the international market.

Wider Audience

One of the best advantages of cyberspace now is the wide audience you can speak to and target, normally starting a business is limited to how far you can deliver your product or service to, which was very small circle in the past, but now in cyberspace, this start circle is big already, the easy access for the end users to reach your products and services by simply type the URL of your site to be in your world, your application is deliverable to every plugged user to the net.

Such an advantage should be used wisely, the solution of the problem should be generalized to serve a wider range of users not only for a specific country of city. When a web applications is served in Arabic for example, we are not targeting only a small city or even one country, but we are targeting every internet user who speaks Arabic wherever he/she is.

Why International Then?

So local or international? personally I chose the international market because I found it more beneficial to me than the local market, I’m not saying that the local market is not good, maybe it is a mine of gold, but not a mine of knowledge, at least not for me.

Internationally I find better knowledge and more competition which helps me develop myself and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, I couldn’t do this while working for the local market.

The tough competition and the variety of solutions available internationally always have motivated me to do more and learn more, not to mention the great opportunity of meeting new people with better knowledge that I can always learn from.

What about you? what do you prefer? working for the international market, or target the local market? and why?

After the reboot and the success it brought to this website (thanks to Mohanad’s design) I have submitted my website to 9rules round 4, two weeks later I was honored to be listed in the preliminary list with another 110 bloggers out of 700 submitted, and yesterday only I got the member agreement that I happily agreed to, placed the lovely logo in the sidebar and officially became a member of the 9rules network.

If you don’t know 9rules already I advise you to visit their website, surf the available communities and read some of their members great posts. I’m sure you will find something of your interest. I am proud to be part of this network of quality and passion, side by side with other great members, joined together to deliver the best content on the web.

Being a member of 9rules is a responsibility more than it is a privilege, a responsibility to write better, to be of more quality and work harder to improve this site and its content, 9rules is a motive to achieve and grow, for me it’s not about traffic or money, so far I have no financial benefit from this website, I blog because I love it and I enjoy it, and hopefully this will be of some benefit to all my readers as it’s meant to be.

Not only towers and buildings or architecture work have a construction stage, we as human beings do construct ourselves too, these years of our twenties when we are working over 15 hours a day to accomplish the unaccomplished and reach the stars, since we are students and after we graduate, putting our dreams, setting our targets and planning for them, then begin the hard work, we start The Construction Stage.

The Two Ways

Whether we are planning to build a successful career and a secure job, or planning to be self employed and independent, in both cases the construction stage is the key to achieve this target, the way we go through and build our assets and our understanding to it.

Career

In the career scenario the target is clear, to find the right job with the right employer that believes in you, utilizes your skills and gives you as much as you give. This job that you will grow with while you are sure that as long as you are doing better, you will get promoted and raised.

Finding this job is the difficult part, after college as a fresh graduate with no experience or practical knowledge, maybe you will spend few years in different jobs until you find your target, meanwhile working on yourself, making better references and gaining respectful experience, this is your construction stage.

Self-employed

Starting a business is not that difficult as it was before, specially if you have the skills and you are able to do it as your profession and craft, but it is more complicated than the career scenario. To go solo you need a capital, resources, you have to build a reputation to move with, not to mention the other responsibilities that you may have, some people have a backup support by their parents or partners, but others don’t and they are fully responsible about their choice and have build it on their own.

One of the reasons why starting a business is more difficult and complicated than building a career is that the employee in general get motivated and encouraged by his management to do more and develop himself, while in the other hand in the solo business situation requires more optimality and strong believe in the self and the dream project itself in order to move forward.

When you are working solo you don’t get encouraged, you are the one who have to take care about everything, the competition the bills, the salaries (if you have employees), and the business itself too, while the employee will take care of himself and his personal skills only as his employer will take care of the rest.

The Hard Way

When your target is to be self employed but at the same time you have bills to pay, then you have to find a job that at least pays your bills and gives you enough time to develop yourself and prepare for the solo move.

I call such a job the Backup Job, it’s the security job, when you are able to secure your life and pay your bills, even save some money to start your own business, it is not the dream job that you are looking for, and not the job that you will get promoted in and do what you love, it is just a job where you do what you know even if you don’t like.

Sometimes even after starting solo business without good planning you may reach the point that you have to do something you don’t like to survive, doing projects that you don’t believe in just to have enough income to support yourself and meet your responsibilities, this is very much related to your planning, if your plan is solid and you did construct well you will not need to do this, and you will be in the exact position you wished for, choosing your own clients and doing the kind of projects that you are really enjoying, not doing them just for the money.

At The End…

It is not just a matter of choice or dream, it’s how much do you believe in your target, and how strong is your will to achieve it, or else why there are many people still working in the same unpromising job for the last decades.. in my opinion it’s either their will that wasn’t enough to help them achieve, or maybe their situation was so bad and they had too much responsibilities to take care of so they didn’t have enough time for themselves.

Back to the four-day week challenge, in the construction stage, I think it should be The 24/7 Challenge depending on our situation, as long as we are in the construction stage the hard work and the believe in what we are doing will take our time at least until we reach a decent position and have the ability to take the four-day week challenge.

Personally I’m in the middle of this stage, what about you? did you build your assets, still planning, or did you already hit your target? share your opinion with us here and let’s learn from each other.

It has become a tradition for the rebooters to list their favorite reboots and discuss it, it’s like a festival that you have to record what you liked in it, so here is only a selection of my favorite reboots as they are really too many and will never fit in here:

Forty Media, a web and branding agency, very elegant and simple, lovely color scheme that represent the proficiency and the friendly nature of the team, I liked the challenging image in the home page about climbing the fence, a design done with another two successful rebooters Joseph Wain and Mike Rundle, what else can be said…

Brayan Veloso, Food banner again, I doubt it is because of his allergy or so, Avalon star comes again with a new design, same star, and lovely tricks, I liked his way of welcoming, specially when the smart site recognize I’m back and not a new visitor..

James Mathias, leihu, tiger and thunder, Buddhist, a site full of lovely content, that you browse happily and enjoy his sense of humor.
James design reflects how calm person he is, and fit his content perfectly, lovely touches and cold green like his eyes.

Phu Ly, or ifelse, a design by a developer, very well organized structure and layout, dark sides, but white background for the article area, much better contrast for the readers, I liked the simplicity and the utilization of the sidebars and footer.

Chris Williams, Large white header with a red sofa and pictures on the wall, good contrast with the content section, small fonts looks great with the design, but not very helpful for long articles read, looks great on wide screen, artistic website represent a modern cyber home of a professional designer.

Nahuel Foronda, asFusion is unique by being the personal website of two people, who are working together, a developer and a designer, naturally it is the designer Nahuel who is behind the design, warm sidebar with cool blue site, and heavenly chosen header.

Rob Goodlatte, After five months of working on a redesign, Rob came up with a lovely color scheme, worm and simple, with cool layout and notable touches.
Yet he is planning to keep it in a state of constant evolution, and so we are waiting.

Natalie Jost, Standards for life, Natalie has demonstrated some very lovely CSS technique, and what’s better she already shared with us the magic behind it, the layout and the content positions just keeps you inside, big website, full of content, and recently joined the 9rules network too, congratulation Natalie.

Bojan Janjanin, realigned site from Croatia, with creamy colors, old photo in the header, gives this warm sensation of the past, just like the site name “Yesterday is Here”, funny seldom asked questions in the sidebar, the content side is a little small but very suitable for the short posts he is doing.

This reboot was very fruitful to all the rebooters and to Adam himself I believe, a lot of beautiful reboots are showing there too, have a look and enjoy the spring spirit and the lovely CSS designs, and create a favorite list too, they are really inspiring.

This reboot was fruitful to me more than it is for my website, it’s not simply a design reboot, I’m not a rebooter this year, but my website is there with Mohanad’s design, the one who supported me a lot during the critical period before the reboot, I had many things to do and projects to deliver, without him this reboot would have been just a dream.

Secondly FRESH PX, the project I’m doing with point-studios, is proudly sponsoring the reboot too, as FRESH PX is a blog templates store, it was a wise decision by Abdelrahman (I didn’t agree with him at first) to sponsor the reboot this spring , specially with all the rebooters there and the great hits that cssreboot website is getting from the community.

Quite a change since November reboot when I started this website with my oriental design and one post only, still I don’t have much posts but maybe after following My New Blog Rules, new posts will come and hopefully with more quality.

The CSS Reboot this season is very competitive, with a lot of great designs, and big names, I think I’ll have to dedicate few hours to see all of them, and maybe I’ll be posting some of my favorites here too.

Currently while preparing for the next reboot, and fortunately NOT as a designer (my dear friend and partner Mohanad is doing it for me), I had enough time to do my homework, read more and do some deep thinking on what could possibly be the best way to have a better writing experiment, so I wrote down the following few rules to commit in every post I do, to make this blog more readable, clean and have as much quality as I can.

Avoid duplicating news posts, try to discuss it instead: One of the biggest mistakes is trying to re-tell a story just for the sake of having a new post or because everybody in the community is talking about it, for example if a new product has launched from some company, next day if not in the same day you will find more than 10 posts talking about the same product and telling its story. Writing about the product itself is not wrong, but how and what to write about it is what concern, the reader had already knew about this product, why should he read your post?, unless there is something new to know.

In other words, flavoring the news, reviewing the product or discussing the event, telling your opinion, and explaining from where you’ve got this opinion, this is what makes your post more interesting and readable, you are not wasting time by duplicating the news anymore, but you are saving time by giving a brief conclusion or review.

Why should I read your blog? Normally new readers reach your blog for one post, if they liked it they may check the rest, if they found them interesting and talking about a topic that they like to read about, then they will subscribe to your feed and come again, but when your blog is so general and one day you talk about astrophysics and the other day giving a cooking recipe, then you should be very special in your writing to keep your readers interested in your subject. Reader will like you for one of two reasons, either your topics are really interesting for them, then even if you are not a really good writer they can tolerate that, or your writing style is very interesting and special so readers enjoy it whatever the subject is.

Everybody may read this post, let’s avoid jargon: Everybody now has an easy access to any kind of information they are looking for, from related websites or from search results, by keeping this in mind it’s better to keep your language simple, and understandable for all readers, this might be a little difficult specially when you choose to write about something technical, but even though don’t always talk to gurus and expect the reader to know everything, try to target the beginners, let them love the subject and become interested in it because of you. Targeting professionals all the time reduce your readers a lot, and targeting all users only also make your readers a non-quality readers, but having quality posts simplified make every reader happy.

Read your post 3-4 times before publishing: When you re-read your posts several times you notice some weak points so you fix them, you feel that some other points are not clear so you clarify, reading your post few times before you publish enhance your post and make it more solid so if you read it again after one week you will not regret any word of it, you will be completely satisfied with it, so will be your readers.

Consistently not constantly: I took this from A List Apart article written by Mark Bernstein about 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, having a better blog is not really about how often you post, or how many articles you have, it is on how quality and readable your posts are, how much do you influence your readers, let them remember this post at least till the end of the day or maybe discuss it with their friends.

In the other hand writing posts consistently is the key, regular, systematic, once or twice a week, or two three times a month, it really doesn’t matter, but what matter is how regular it is, regularity means not to sleep over a month without blogging, but when you blog you give something really readable and you do that every certain period of time.

Reputation and Personality: Your posts will reflect your personality, and will affect your reputation, while you are reading your post over and over again prior publishing, think about these two factors carefully, is this really your opinion, or you are just copying an opinion, are you convinced and able to convince with this opinion, how much will this affect your credibility and reputation? they seem like big questions, but they will stop writing junk posts, when you have it clear that this post complete the accumulative picture of yours in the readers mind you will be more serious about it.

Writing for the web is not as easy as it looks, specially when you have serious goals, when you want more people to read you, and enjoy reading you, interacting with you, and supporting you, thousands and thousands of blogs are coming up everyday but not everyone is readable, many of them are made for fun, or for friends and family only, very few got to the top because of their interesting topics and style of writing, one easy way to summarize all the above rules is to put yourself in the reader’s shoe, read your post as if you are reading it for the first time, will you like it, or just close the window, you are your best reader and critic, and if you don’t really care about readers, then I think you didn’t understand why you are writing in the first place.

The unique feature in PersonalDNA is that it doesn’t take your answers as True/False only, no Black or White, but it takes Gray as an answer, in many answers it was very rare that I was completely positive or negative to any question, most of the time I’m either in the middle but a little bit moved to some side or the other one.. something like: dark gray, or light gray.. so I’m very satisfied about my answers and there was no answer that I was confused about. And as a result, here is my PersonalDNA:

Now if you didn’t take this test yet, or still thinking about taking it, you should try it right away.. and try it with your friends too, because it will be very helpful.. I have recommended it to my friends and they generously accepted to show me their results, it helped me a lot in understanding them better and know how to deal with them to maintain a better relationship.

Last January I was hired to do a web design and development as a full time job and I wanted to do something unique and new, specially in my region (The Middle East and Dubai), and after a good search I decided to buy Zeldman’s book “Designing with Web Standards”, at first I didn’t know what is all these standards about and didn’t know the author himself neither, after reading the book I understood that I was missing a very big deal of the Cyberspace nowadays, a lot of trends, knowledge and stuff are waiting out there. Very special thanks to Zeldman to the doors he opened to me through his book and blog, thanks to the Web Standards Community and ALA writers, who shared their knowledge for free, everyday some more knowledge, something new to read, a lot on the schedule to learn.

A year from now I was using IE and its favourites for bookmarking, depending my whole day on some desktop applications, subscribed to a lot of newsletters that I didn’t really read.. but now in 2006 I’ve noticed that I’m completely changed:

• I use del.icio.us for my Bookmarks.
• I use Bloglines to read my favourite blogs (I’m not subscribed to newsletters anymore).
• I use 37signals products (Ta-da, BaseCamp and BackPack) to organize myself and my work better.
• I log my music on AudioScrobbler, discovering some new music on Last.FM.
• I’m rolling on Ruby on Rails, and enjoying Ajax.
• I started some new projects like Amidship (with Mohanad Alyajouri) and FRESH PX (with Abdelrahman Osama).

2005 was really a fruitful year for me where I learned a lot and I think it’s time now in 2006 for some real achievements and some real work.

The Name: Everybody thinks about his business as a ship, where he is the Captin to run it, we are trying to be this ship amidship, by centralizing its management and controlling its resources in a better way in amidship way.

Why Online? Everything is moving online, every company has internet access already, why to bother installing softwares and maintaining them while you can have it online hosted and maintained by us, giving you the best way of controlling your business remotely as long as you have internet connection, communicate better with your staff who can work even from their homes.