Archive | Blog news

10 Years of +961 and 10 Days of Giveaways!

Today is a special day for +961 as it marks the 10th anniversary since I started it!

I can’t say I saw this day coming when I first registered the domain name… at first I just started the blog to share cool finds with Lebanese online community and see how much traffic I can drive to it, but I have to admit that later on I even started enjoying the attention that media and businesses was giving to me. And here it is now, part of my everyday life and celebrating its 10th year online.

A lot has changed since February 2008 and +961 definitely had a lot of ups and downs. I got heavily praised for some posts that received thousands of hits but also heavily criticized for inappropriate or silly stuff that I shared. At times I was posting on a daily basis but also got inactive for a relatively long duration more that once (blame it all on having babies but family comes first!). However, what changed the most is actually how blogging is in general done in Lebanon. Back in time most of the posts contained original content generated by the blogger himself/herself, but nowadays society and lifestyle blogs are more like news aggregators that feed on bits and pieces collected from various sources with a lot of sponsored content in between (a special thanks to the Lebanese subreddit for being a huge inspiration for us bloggers by the way! 😀 ), and as long as this appeals to the people then you just go with the flow! I’m being just plain honest here.

Right now I have no idea if the blog will stay around for another 10 years, but what I’m certain of is that I enjoyed the past 10 thanks to you guys being part of it, and will definitely keep posting for as long as I simply enjoy doing it.

Now on to the really big news!

To celebrate this 10th anniversary, I decided to host a series of 10 giveaways in collaboration with very well known businesses and brands in town. So get ready as of tomorrow for some really cool freebies! The giveaways range from restaurant vouchers, to movie tickets, clothing, toys and gadgets, and fine dining.

To qualify for the draws you will only be required to interact with the giveaways’ posts on Facebook, so just make sure to follow +961’s page.

photo via jerseybites.com

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Crest made me smile

Remember the banner I displayed a while ago for Crest’s competition “Spread the Smile”? It wasn’t a paid ad, but I was actually taking part in a “competition” organized by Leo Burnett among some other Lebanese bloggers to drive  as much traffic as we can to Crest’s page on Facebook, with prizes for the top 3 blogs sending traffic, and yours truly got the iPad 2 above for ranking among the top 3 blogs.

It sure pays to blog and have a cool audience like you, since I couldn’t have made if it weren’t for your clicks! Thanks you!

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Just Married!

Is that enough explanation for the lack of posts on +961?

I actually got married on July 1st and I’m currently spending some time (AKA honeymoon) at probably one of the best places on earth. Phuket, Thailand.

See you in a while! 🙂

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… and I’m back!

Thanks to a “technical difficulty” my host was facing, you might have noticed that +961 was down for the past two days. Needless to say, I’m now searching for a new host. Any suggestions?

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Lebanese bloggers meetup at T-Marbouta

RFI

It’s all over the Lebanese blogsphere now… Yesterday night I went to T-Marbout along with several Lebanese bloggers to meet with Philippe Couve, Pierre Haski (www.rue89.com), and Eric Scherer from Radio France Internationale.

The meeting purpose was for the French journalists and bloggers to get to know more about the Lebanese blogsphere and its status. We discussed several issues such as why blogging isn’t very popular here in Lebanese, and why do some bloggers post very frequently when things heat up in Lebanon and then dump their blogs when everything calms down. They were also interested in knowing if anyone of us had a problem with the authorities because of some content (I wasn’t surprised with that question, at the end we’re an Arab country!).

In addition, while discussing the Lebanese people in general, we all agreed that they hate to read and write, they’re just good at grasping already processed information. Which explains why they’re all active on Facebook, and very few of them thought of starting a blog. Lazy nation!

w heik..! by the end of the meetup I was glad I had the chance to finally meet Maya Zankoul & Tarek Chemaly.

Here’s a list of the bloggers who were there:

20minutes.fr
beirutntsc.blogspot.com
choueichoueibeyrouth.blogspot.com
qussa.nl
diaryofahalfandhalf.wordpress.com
mayazankoul.wordpress.com
29letters.wordpress.com
klekeesh.blogspot.com
hanane.me
onoffbeirut.com
rue89.com
atelier.rfi.fr
kibot.blog.com
bloggingbeirut.com

And finally, here’s what others have posted about the meeting:

Maya Zankoul
Tarek Chemaly
Samer Karam
Pierre Haski
Hummus Nation (a blogger I really would like to meet someday!)

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Brand new theme!

Once again, I got a new theme, I know it’s not good to change themes very frequently but this one is “cleaner” and its comment section is much cooler!

What do you think?

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+961 getting new outfit!

Just started to install a new theme on the blog… hope nothing goes wrong!

Update:

I am almost done, everything went fine except for some compatibilty issues with Internet Explorer (I HATE IT!).
The main advantage of this theme is the 3 tabbed widgets to the right (Recent posts, Recent comments, and Archives), and they appear normally in Firefox, however I noticed they’re appearing under each other in Internet Explorer. I promise I will work on fixing it by tonight.

I will also restore the missing widgets (Beirut photos & Eyes of Lebanon) later today.

Still, I’d love to have your feedback, what do you think about the new theme? Anything to improve?

Update 2:

Woohoo! I fixed the tabbed widgets! They’re working fine on Internet Explorer now.
The contact is now gone for a while since its background doesn’t match the new theme. Gotta go find a better one.

Update 3:

Be careful what colors you choose next time you plan the change your website theme, I just got a question asking if I am a aounist since the color of “961” in the header above is orange!!

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Pages update

As you might have noticed I have added 2 new pages just below the header, “My Photography” where you can see a slideshow containing some of the best photos I’ve taken so far, and “Contact” where you can… you know what!

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Blog links all down!

I noticed today morning that all the blog links (posts, pages) are down, nothing is functioning except for the homepage… 🙁

It must be the result, of yesterday’s migration. I am currently following up on the issue with my webhost support.

Update: All is working great now!

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