+961 went down for more than 8 hours today because my host was migrating my account to a faster server. But for some reason they forgot to mention to me the IP address of the new server, so plus961.com ended up pointing to nowhere!
Anyway, the problem is now solved, DNS updated, and I’m back on track!
Did you notice what I recently added on the right under “Eyes of Lebanon”?
It’s a drop down list containing various locations in Beirut and the surroundings, when you choose location and click “Check Area” a new window will open containing a snapshot taken by a webcam positioned at that location, and the snapshots will auto refresh every 30 seconds, even if you kept the window open.
It’s not a new idea, the service is actually available via the LBC Group website through a service called “Eyes of Lebanon“. There you will find the very same webcam locations, except that the location links are spread on a dedicated webpage. So I thought of using my scripting skills and gather all these links into one drop down list that would fit in my sidebar, and let the readers check them out!
The webcams can be very beneficial sometimes when you need to check if there’s traffic congestion at one of the available areas. (Actually that’s their main purpose!)
P.S: If you would like to publish them on your website as well, I will be glad to provide you with the script I wrote. Just contact me on rami[at]plus961[dot]com
I usually use flickr to publish my photos online, and lately I’ve been searching for some script that would pull my photostream from flickr and publish it on some dedicated page here. I finally found FlickrViewer which does a great job, not to forget that it’s easy to setup.
So today, I present to you my humble set of photos on the following link:
http://plus961.com/photos (I also added a link to it under “Blogroll” on the right).
Enjoy the collection and keep coming! the page will be frequently updated.
Once again my website went down… This time it was because my web host thought I am abusing their service through videos.plus961.com (now inactive)… so they suspended my account!
Anyway, here I am, online again. و لن يستطيعوا إسكات الصوت الحرّ، لول
Due to a problem with my host, the website was down for more than 8 hours yesterday! Here’s the e-mail they sent me:
Good day Rami,
We have received the report from our technical team and they have started doing the work after proposing a solution.
The issue found on your server is RAID array degradation (triggered by the traffic spikes earlier and high data read/write request). Our team had replaced the server’s HDD with new hard disk drive and already started to rebuild the array which may take up to 3 hours to complete.
We ask for your patience and understanding.
This advisory has been issued for transparency and to keep you abreast with the events.
Thank you very much.
The Management
W heik! Shu 3andkon akhbar?
I got a new idea today, and you can see it right at the end of each post. The new “Share this article on Facebook” link will let you share any of my posts on your Facebook profile for your friends to check it out.
You get nice content on your profile and I get extra visitors! It’s a Win/Win situation, no? 😀
Following the creation of a fan page for +961, I have created a group for Lebanese Bloggers on Facebook. The aim of that group is to gather Lebanese Bloggers to get to know each other.
I’m definitely interested in getting to know more Lebanese blogs out there, I already have few in my RSS reader but I’m sure there are still a lot more.
So far the group has 4 member, Antoine Khater from Adidap.com, Mireille Raad from LifeGeeked.com, Farah Soubra from NoisyThinking.com, and… myself!
Care to join? http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44733691275
I have just created a facebook fan page for this blog, it is meant to interact more with readers who are on facebook.
If you guys have an account, feel free to become a fan by visiting the page located on the following link: http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/961/30258888983
You will have the opportunity to share your thoughts on the discussion board or upload interesting photos from Lebanon and I will be publishing them here on the blog.
I know I have a relatively small reader base, but I aim at expanding it through facebook… I hope.
I have just noticed today that my blog here has a PageRank 4! I wasn’t following the PageRank update here on Plus961 because I noticed that the Lebanese blog sphere doesn’t give much importance to it.
If you’re not familiar with what PageRank is about, well it basically determines the importance level (on a scale of 1 to 10) of a certain page on the internet. The more links you get for your website, the higher the PageRank you get.
For more about PageRank, click here.
It’s been more that 10 days now since I last updated my blog, and that’s mainly due to all the projects I am working on completing at both work and university (no I’m not an undergraduate, I’m pursuing an MBA), in addition to taking a break and going for a 3 days beach vacation in Latakia (Syria), there’s some nice resort there called “Côte d’Azur de Cham” (funny name?), not that great but it is nice.
By the way, I found out that taking a break while you’re in the middle of numerous projects is a BAD idea, talk about time management!!
Anyway, here’s a panoramic photo that I took from my room. (Click to enlarge)
Now that I’m back to Beirut (almost a week ago), I’m still struggling with my endless duties… wish me luck for the next few days!
P.S: If you were trying to reach my blog today then you probably have received an error connecting to the database. That was actually caused by an outage at one of my hosting company servers. So sorry for that, but it’s out of my control.
