Blue Chi’s

Just saw the new brand identity of Oman on Sangeetha’s Digital Oman. It was launched this evening by the Oman Brand Management Unit (OBMU). The logo was designed by Landor – the same company that produced in the past the logos for Pepsi, Microsoft, FedEx, and many more.

I’m not really sure how feel about the new identity, I am not sure what I was expecting, but I didn’t see this coming. I was not “WOW”ed by it. I’m not used to seeing all these new Oman related logos that do not have any of the colours of the flag.

I think that a brand of a country is not only targeted at people outside the country, but also at people inside the country as it might be a tool used to alter our own perception of our country.

I’m outraged by the fact that there is no website for OBMU or the new brand identity. I was checking the websites of all the horrible Omani newspapers and couldn’t find a single picture of the logo until Sangeetha posted about it. 

What do you guys think of the new logo?

Our recent competition at Republic of Code is about to finish. We received submissions from Sri Lanka, Iran, Jordan, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Czech, the US, and Argentina. It’s funny that we did not receive a single submission from Oman, well, it does make sense that we changed the name of the wesbite after all I guess.

If you are a registered member at Republic of Code please help us select the final winner by voting in the poll. We restricted the ability to vote to member who have been registered for a period of three days or more to stop people from cheating, so if you do not have an existing Republic of Code account then you will not be able to register!

A lot of bloggers in Oman are starting to use Twitter these days and it was really fun having a number of people giving us live coverage of Gulf Cup matches using twitter.

One thing I noticed is that the majority of people are using the standard Twitter web portal to tweet, which is extremely bare and does not provide a lot of fuctionality, I am not sure how mny people know that there many different standalone Twitter clients that can enhance your Twitter experience.

I tried a number of clients on the PC and the iPod touch, but the one I would like to talk about today is TweetDeck. This is is a desktop client available for Windows, Mac and Linux that is built on AIR - an Adobe technology for creating desktop applications with online functionality. 

TweetDeck runs on your computer like any other application, it can be minimized to the toolbar. Whenever someone makes a tweet you will get a small IM like notification. TweetDeck has one-click URL shortening, message shortening, TwitPic upload, and friend groups. Like the majority of AIR applications, it is extremely light and has a clean UI.

TweetDeck is free, so if you are a Twitter user there is no reason for you not to give it a try. You will need to install the Adobe AIR runtime if you don’t have that already.

I have previously also tried twhirl - another AIR based desktop client, twitterfic – an application for the iPhone/iPod touch, Twitter Tools – a WordPress plug-in for making tweets (currently using this for Republic of Code twitter account), and the official Twitter Facebook application for posting my tweets as Facebook status updates.

I used the Twitter Mobile Portal in the past, but now I make most of my on-the-go tweets using SMS.

I’m not sure if anybody else uses any special Twitter clients, but Muscati seems to be using TwitterBerry on his Blackberry as you can see from the screenshot above.

Here are some of the most amazing videos I’ve seen on the internet, they are all so simple and touching. None of these goes for more than 10 minutes. If you are using a fast connection, make sure you click the video to go to the YouTube page and watch the HD version.

I am not going to talk about why I love these videos, I am just so crazy about them I can’t write enough.

Fifty People, One Question

The Phone Next Door

Mirror, Mirror On the Wall

I am also in love with Where the Hell is Matt (2008), but I’m sure most of you have already seen that. Check out the YouTube Project Direct Channel to watch some other nice short films, I’m surprised the Phone Next Door did not win?!

vBulletin is probably the most popular online discussion board software on the Internet. On the Omani internet, it is probably the ONLY discussion board software used at all! We have recently installed version 3.8.0 at Republic of Code and I can’t really say that I like it.

First of all, the difference between 3.8.0 and 3.7.x is not major, social network features are now just more emphasised. The majority of vB new features over the last two years are just making the whole thing seriously over cluttered, there is no way to disable most of the new features and it is really annoying. vBulletin has been trying to become a blogging platform, an online gallery, a CMS, a social network, and I don’t know what else. The majority of these new stupid services are never used the majority of users.

This problem is not new, when was the last time you used the Calendar feature on your forum? When was the last time you or one of your members ever clicked on the built-in FAQ section? Why the hell do we need to have the total number of posts and threads on the side of the forum index?  And now the new “Community” link on the toolbar is just driving me crazy. (You need to log-in to see it)

I know that it is possible to remove all these features by manually editing the templates and removing the links, but that is such a hassle, especially as you might have to update your template manually afterwards each time you upgrade the script. 

If I were to start a new forum I would not pay to use vBulletin, I’m waiting patiently for bbPress to take off, but there doesn’t seem to be any progress with that project. It is such a shame.

That is not to say that there aren’t vB features which I like,  I love their AJAX implementation and how you can edit posts and thread lists on the fly. I generally like their template structure, I like the PM system, and I LOVE THE TAGGING FEATURES. I took a quick look around a number of Omani forums and it does not seem that anybody is using this feature even though it’s been introduced for a about a year now.

Tagging is the best way for organising content and making your threads link to each other in a logical way. I tag every single thread at the Flash Forum to make it easy for members to find threads with similar problems. My stats say that more and more members are clicking on these tag links and are browsing for threads that way.

I do not think that I will be changing vBulletin anytime soon, but I will surely make some many changes to the toolbar and forum index to simplify things and make sure that useless features do not contribute to the clutter.

(Photo Credits: ktylerconk)

Earlier this week I decided to stop buying music CDs and only purchase digital music downloads if I had to choose between the two. In the last four years since legal music downloads became a proper medium for buying music I just never got myself to buy digital downloads because (1) I didn’t see value in buying music that I can only play on my iPod (2) the physical CD cover and artwork provided me with value I couldn’t get with digital downloads, but I finally changed my mind earlier this week because (1) I got a new iPod several months ago and I think that I will keep it for a couple of years at least, so it is not like I would play my songs on anything else, (2) I gave up on my passion for plastic and because realised that I do not know what I will be doing with all thsee CDs in the future. (3) It was already possible to buy DRM-Free music from Amazon.

In the past four or so years I bought less than 20 digital tracks, most of which were  iTunes exclusives which I couldn’t legally get from anywhere else.  

On Saturday I bought my first ever full album on iTunes (Leona Lewis – Spirit) and decided that I will not be buying any more music plastic from now on.

To my surprise, Apple announced two days ago that it is going to ditch DRM completey. This means that only remaining reason to buy CDs is only for sentimental value, which is not a huge deal really if you think about it.

I bought my first DRM-free song from iTunes yesterday, and as described, you can convert it to an .mp3 file with a single click.

I’m one of those people who switched to Google Chrome on the first day it came out. I still have to use Firefox about once a week to finish some Republic of Code work using a special extension that is only available for Firefox, but I’m practically using Chrome all day long.

Chrome comes with a feature called Incongnito which lets you browse the Internet without storing any information about what you do online on your machine. Many people dubbed this feature “Porn Mode” as that seemed to be its most obvious use!

But I’ve found it very helpful (for stuff other than porn) because runs in sort of a sandbox that is unconnected to your other information and cookies. This means that you can log-into two Gmail or Facebook accounts at the same time by opening an Incognito window and using it for your second account.

I have multiple Gmail accounts which I use for different things, for example, my feeds are managed through Google feedburner through my first Google account, but I use Google Analytics through another account. It’s confusing how I ended up there, but using Incognito I can stay logged in both accounts without having to log-out from one to check the other.

This is also helpful when you’re using your computer and then someone comes in saying that they want to check their email, you do not have to log-out of your account, just open an Incognito window and let them check it from there!

Got this from Amjad, a professor in Sohar College of Applied Sciences is doing a research on blogging and is collecting some info on bloggers. If have the time please fill the survey and email it to her (the email is included in the file). It did not take me 2 minutes to complete. You can download the file from here.

I’ve been experimenting with Disqus for a couple of weeks now and I’m so in love with. This is a free blog comments service that helps in connecting posts by a single commentator through a stream so that you can follow what a person is saying across a number of posts or even blogs as long as they all use Disqus.

For example, because I now have Disqus installed on my blog, whenever someone hovers over a username, he can see the list of comments that person made on my blog for other posts, and because I have Disqus installed on my other blogs as well (Omani Cuisine and myITLawyer), it is possible to track the comments of a user across other blogs as well. In the example below, if you hover over the username of Kishor, you will see that he posted 5 days ago on a post on myITLawyer.com, as well as on two other posts on this blog!

It is still possible to click on the username of the person to go to his website if he has specified it. You should also note that Kishor did not actually have to register on this website or even provide any sort of identification for himself, Disqus links usernames with the emails attached to them and figures out who is who.

Now imagine how awesome if all of our blogs were connected this way? If a blogger has this installed Disqus on his blog then comments he makes on his blog would also be visible to those who check his “profile” from any other blog that has Disqus as well.

Disqus is available for WordPress, Blogger and Typepad. 

It is totally free, syncs your comments on your blog database as well as the Disqus server, has tight spam filters, provides the feature to respond to a comment by email! and also provides you with a centralized panel to manage all your blogs and participations.

I advice ALL bloggers to install Disqus so that we can all enjoy the blogging ‘community’. It is TOTALLY FREE, so why don’t you just try it?

(I forgot to mention that Disqus now also offers Facebook connect functionality, so people can comment using their facebook username and password, this currently only links the comments that individual, but soon it will also have the feature to make wall notifications whenever a user chooses to comment using Facebook Connect. DISQUS IS THE COOLEST!)

We decided to start the year 2009 with a major new decision: Change the name of Oman3D into Republic of Code.

Our main issues with the previous name was that it (1) alienated visitors from other countries and traffic coming from Omani was less than 1% of our total traffic (2) it gave the wrong message about what our core competence is, our 3D content makes up less than 15% of our total page views. 

We wanted to get a new domain name that sounded international and was not strictly tied to a single technology, the term republic indicates the unity of people for a common purpose and the term code is a tool that governs how a sytem operates (that could apply to a political system or a computer system).

We thought about the length of our domain name, but we know that the majority of our traffic comes from search engines and referral links and that less than 10% of our members actually type the URL to visit the website we thought that the length of republicofcode.com was not too long. We also compared it to other websites which have long domain names such as smashingmagazine.com, good-tutorials.com, and freelanceswitch.com, both of which are just as long or even longer.

We have reached the famous half a million pageview milestone and the start a new year would be the best time to start with a new name!

Our traffic will drop a little bit because of our the impact of changing the domain on our pagerank, but it is a price we have to pay.