Degrees or Lastnames?

No I ain’t talking about Wasta or anything of that sort, I just read this on Arabian Business, a comment on one of the articles, Name reads as follows: Firozali Mulla MBA PhD.

Couldn’t not post it here, that’s pathetic. I remember an e-mail address that read like some_name_mba@domain.com. I mean, ah, weirdos! Maybe, a Dr. or an Eng. or whatever on your card, but on a comment form? And degrees?

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The Right Website for the Right Job

It’s often hard to find a service that’d fulfill your needs and yet has an active business model on the web. Usually it’s either a specialized website that works best or a product of a geeky group who wanted to prove their skills in Web-Development. But finally, in ME, we’re getting some directed, informed, and demanded services right from the businesses that could handle such services.

Of course, some compromises have to be made. Trade some for some. Despite all that, I see a winner in UAE property market Portals. A real winner, in fact not only in the Property corner but everything looked for. Say classifieds.

And that is Gulf News classifieds websites. Now at the first glance their choice of domain names are corny and really old fashioned and not picked wisely or at least picked by geeks, it shows, not business decision out there.

The fact that Gulf News took the initiative to lead and create a dedicated Classifieds website is a joy in itself, it’s happening, the real stuff are coming online in the ME.

If you’re online as much as everybody else then you’d know that so many classifieds websites are out there, so many property portals, so many jobs portals, but I tell ya this, Gulf News is the most picked. And now with it going fully online. Add to that the resources at Gulf News’ disposal, and the number of readers and the offline-online integration of ads display, now that’s a killer, and hey, don’t forget how big the effect of GN is. Check this out

So if you’re smart enough, you already got it, integrate into GN’s portal, if you’ve got a property portal propose an API sharing with GN, share data, mash-up you suckers! Move it! Capitalize on that!

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Feeds and Facebook in one page

Now I get to check out my Facebook and read my feeds all in one page. Neat.

How didn’t I know about this before, darn, that’s because I’ve ditched my feeds and my favorite netvibes page. So now that I’ve upgraded to the new version I get to add the Facebook Widget and get to do all in one place, man, and I was asking myself why didn’t I go with Bloglines or Google Reader, Netvibes foreva!

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Dot AE domain names

In the last 13 months, we had the chance to work on 18 “.ae” domains, in which we registered six of them. At dots & lines, we sometimes take the liberty of deciding domain names, and 90% of the time we’re the hosting mediators too. So that involves us in selecting the best suiting hosting and sometimes the e-mail plans for our clients. With 18 domain names, only 3 domain names out of the 12 worked seamlessly when DNS records needed to change and those were the ones for large corporates who had an Etisalat account-manager in their disposal.

The Experience

While reviewing our work from last year, the “.ae” records kept us skeptical on going with the UAE choice over and over again since “.ae” domains can not be modified by third-parties who are not associated with the person/company who registered the domains.

This is a typical drill, a client has a domain name registered by either a direct domain name registration or a domain name that came free of charge while purchasing a Business-One service from Etisalat. Client needs a website, so we get involved, next, we need to host their website thus, need to update some DNS records which can only be changed by the client or a person who registered it. By either e-mail or fax, and only from the same addresses filled in the registration fields. Our roll has always been preparing the letters sending to clients, and then letting them know who to send the letters to, and god forbid something goes wrong, it has to happen again, that is two more days of delay and that’s if the request was taken care of immediately.

Unlike .com/.net/.org that could be all modified in an online app, “.ae” DNS, A-Records should be changed by either sending e-mails or faxes to UAE-NIC in which lately had been a 10 days work.

Changes that affected UAE NIC

I can’t recall having any issues with “.ae” domains before du was formed and before the formation of TRA which took UAE NIC away from Etisalat’s control and made it into an independent body, causing UAE NIC slowness caused by maybe understaffed team or just a restructuring procedure that is complicating the communications with UAE NIC.

My findings are, NIC is really understaffed, and to be honest, while the NIC clients work from 9 to 6, I can’t understand how NIC gets to wrok from 8 to 3? Hoping for a quick change, soon, “.ae” has finally become popular for UAE businesses and it’s not the right time for a huge mess-up, hope someone would hear us out.

The coming soon story

While seeing the coming soon banners on UAENIC homepage for online-services gives us hope every time we search or check for a domain name availablility it is getting a little out of hand as how clients demand do not match the quality of UAENIC time frames and services.

Please share if you’ve been in our shoes too, it’s important, we can make a change, let us hear you out.

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Life on Auto-Pilot mode

Heard it from many, specially those who know me through this Blog, “You ain’t writing anything anymore”, they say that all the time. It’s mostly every month that I think of writing/posting something, but then I think again and keep telling myself that ain’t a piece to write about and just pollute the cyberspace with nonsense and passive comments or controversy. From what it’s worth, learned that comments are not always opinions. Specially when life passes you by so fast with a year full of surprises and new adventures.

Yeah, kept the “Busy” flag on top of every random point I was spotted, but things I’ve missed are yet more than I imagined, specially the habits that changed. Stopped reading my RSS-Feeds for such a long time, most of the blogs changed style, tone, and became really aged and mature, missed more than 15 issues of my favorite webzine; A List Apart, my favorite designer’s blog John Hicks, can’t believe I’ve actually forgot how to write in Textile format while editing this very post.

I guess things have changed, things that were boring like reading News and Business/Industry updates replaced my reading dose that used to be all Technology/Development/Design. I stopped ranting as I used to all the time, instead, trying to make the change by actions instead of negative and angry comments, it’s really amazing how the transition took place, from an angry observer design critique to a person who actually does the change and makes difference, actions baby! It’s amazing and a bless to be able to do that, lucky!

It all just happened, it’s amazing. I should have some more stuff to share, some of the last year’s experiences in Design, Advertising, Client Servicing, and some off-points, like losses and big wins. It’ll come out, this post should be a good start.

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