Jan 05
5
Lisan al-Dawat Fonts
The difference is quite much and know to the literate and learned people of Dawat as well as the educated Gujaratis. The community mainly of traders and business men, whose religious linage is traced to the Fatimids in Cairo are well known among the Gujaratis by Vohras or Bohras and are the most faithful followers of the vicegerent of the Fatemi Imams (who is in Seclusion), the Dail Mutlaq. The Na’ib and Dai al-Mutlaq today is His Holimess Dr. Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin (tus) a very well know and high profiled personality of India. He is often reffered to as the Ambassador of Peace.
Well I am not to discuss about the community and its affairs here as my main concern is the LD font and its development. But for those who really want to know more about these people can visit their official portal http://mumineen.org , it has been rated so by BBC. I would recommend Jonah Blank’s best seller Mullas on the Mainframe and The illustrated Biography for those interested.
Let me be brief about Lisan al-Dawat. It is written in the Arabic script from right to left and is a blend of Mainly Gujarati and Arabic. Further more it also reflects Urdu and Farsi in its literature and day to day conversations. Mainly it was devoloped by the Dais (Doat Kiram) for easy communication with the local gujaratis when the dawat shifted to India along with maintaining the sweetness and brevity of Arabic and the spiritual and celestial charm of the Quranic language and its all incompassing knowledge.
The LD font was first developed in Surat at al-Jamea tus Saifiyah and it did need an Arabic OS to type out the LD in word in addition to a small program that provided the special Ky Hacks for che, gaf, pe and so on (the Farsi/Urdu alphabets). Lots of content was made digital using this font. This was the initial Burhani font (I guess Murtaza Shk Mohammed Shk Tayyebali was the guy behind it and it was the year 1998 maybe.) A few years later a group of students in Mumbai got hold of the Bagdadi Fonts and played with it to get a very initial version of Taheri. (Someone made to the top of Badri Mahal IT using this font to show the talents).
I got hold of this font in 1422 (until when I was using Burhani Old) when Shz Ammar Bhaisaheb DM asked mumineen.org to prepare a matrimonial site for him (Though the site never met its purpose for some reason). The Taheri font was used for the first time on the WWW in this project (in fact this was the first time any LD font was used on the web). People on mumineen.org had worked hard for getting up the Database driven site for the sole purpose of serving the community and the LD font was used to publish the Shadi Ni Rusumaat book. It has also been translated in English by Muhammad Rangoonwala with the help of Asgar Fakhruddin. The entire translation was checked and edited by me as it was prepared.
Back to the track – Taheri had a serious problem the Jazam and other Aeraab and some of the characters had been changed to fit the LD character set. Though the replaced characters were as important but who cared, lets use what we have now and will think later when we are stuck. So there I was stuck with Taheri, the character coding changed from the Arabic setting to a suit personal interests. Yusuf Goolamabbas and Taher Haveliwala (all mumineen.org team) tried to give me some hints to fix the font as I had talked to them having realised the problem. Hey, I am dumb and need a proper tutor to get everything in place. Sorry guys I have not been able to fix the font yet.
Ah, the story doesn’t end here nor does it take turns. The real problem was not the character replacement which I have managed to fix and tried to spread the font (I will call it Taheri V2) all over so that people would use it as a platform at least for the keyboard settings but ego does come in a way always. So what is the problem. YG says the problem is with the double key hacks used for certain characters in LD. He talked to Simon Montagu of Netscape and gave me a kick start to talk with these gurus too but the communication gap kept me back. The problem was obvious if you guessed it, ha, YG’s favorite browser Mozilla won’t display the Taheri V2 font, the one I had fixed (it didn’t before correction either). We tried on various platforms and using multiple browsers but the font display gave hiccups at times. The unicode settings of Taheri are also not proper, Taher did try to fix it. The unicode was in place but the keyboard setting was disturbed. So we are back on the same track, just where we started point zero.
Then there was a lets say higher version of (Burhani Old) called Saifee was developed on the same keyboard mappings as old Taheri. The font is the same as Traditional Arabic.
The Mohalla Burhaniyah guys (One of them being Qainan Idrees whom I came in touch with) from Karachi renamed the Saifee to Burhani (lets call B2) to boast they had hit a jackpot and spread it all over via a quiz program they run during Ramadan.
Fatemi, the font Jamea Saifiyah Boasts to be perfectly in place (for their own use, why bother about the future or the community). I have seen and used all versions of Fatemi but I am sad to say they could have done it better for the community sake. The script of Fatemi is indeed wonderful and beautiful, none can match it, I must say. But the creator of the font didn’t take care and look at the essentials of a font. Nor did they look for backward compatibility. What about the work that has been done by people all over the globe in LD in the past years. Hundreds if not thousands of pages typed out. How are we ever going to use that material if suppose we loose the fonts used in the past.
Let me not forget Shk Khuzaima Rangwalla who was moallim in Hong Kong and managed to digitize his handwriting named as Mohammedi (3 styles are there). YG helped him out but the work was simply a trace of Taheri2 and did not help much. Much of Rangwalla’s personal and valuable work in LD was done using this font. He made his way to the Attalim office in Karachi as a result of his talent.
My observations about Taheri V2
It works fine for typing on all Arabic enabled platforms of windows (Win2K gives some hiccups at times) and renders well in IE as well as Firefox 1.0. Here I need to add that I have checked LD on my blog and it works fine with blogger as well as the display in Win 98 Arabic, Win XP and Win2K in IE and Firefox 1.0 . My blog template is pure HTML.
Second observation is that it does not render at all on any of the above browsers and OS on the mumineen.org page. The same content and the same tool (blogger). The mumineen.org template is based on PHP. Does that cause any problems with the rendering? Dont know.
Another observation is that mails are properly received and sent in LD using Taheri V2 if the platform is Arabic enabled. Yahoo mail displays proper LD messages and sends as well. Gmail does not.
This is all I remember about my experience with Lisan al-Dawat font devolopment.
Ah, one thing I can never forget is that, I was able to do some research into this by the Dua of Syedna (tus). May Allah grant him a long life. Ameen
Posted in Dawoodi Bohras Education Internet & Hosting Jamea Language Madrasa Personal Technology by .
Jan 05
4
Why Your Business Will Fail
Then what is it about? Good question. Its about why your business will fail, regardless of how good your business plan is, regardless of how much technological knowledge you possess, regardless of your experience and the resources you have available to you. Your business will fail. Why?
Web hosting is a very competitive field. As start ups spring forth on a seemingly daily basis, competition continues to grow and in essence, everyone is after the same pie. Granted the pie continues to expand as well, due to the ever increasing number of businesses finally realizing that they need a web site, and because of countries whose economic condition now make the internet an affordable commodity.
Sure, we are all after the same pie, and even if you are competing with businesses on a local level, you are still after the same customers, customers who will pay you money to host their web site.
One question continues to linger on, particularly in an industry as competitive as web hosting: why should customers choose you over your competitors?
It is this question that, if left unanswered, will eventually drive your business into the ground in due time. Regardless of your marketing plan, or how much money you have budgeted for advertising. And no matter how many books you have read about managing servers. Answering this question ought to be a priority for web host start ups.
Do I Have Your Attention?
Many web hosts have ventured into a plethora of different marketing strategies and explored different avenues when it comes to devising an advertising campaign that will reach their target market. But many web hosts fail to realize who their customers are, and ignore the fact that their very own competitors are out to reach the same customers.
Visit your favorite internet search engine, or more specifically, a web hosting directory and you will see what I am talking about. You are instantly bombarded by a number of web hosts screaming for customer attention. But just how do they grab customer attention?
What? By showing off their features and price? How many times have you seen advertisements of web hosts showing off the features of their web hosting plan, along with the price, and, of course, the name of their company? Now multiply that many times over and that is what customers are seeing.
How does a customer choose amidst a flood of data, features that vary from one host to another, disk space and bandwidth numbers that do not really mean much for customers new to web hosting, and prices that seem to be randomly pulled out of the air?
Compete By Price?
Okay, so one way of catching my attention is giving me the absolute lowest price imaginable for web hosting. Thats right. Give me your absolute best, ultra-loaded, gargantuan hosting plan for pennies on the dollar, and give me a free domain to boot. Do we have a deal? Yes? Well thats great! Now, where do I sign up?
You have probably seen web hosts offering ridiculous offers with prices that are so low they make you cringe with fear. How do they get away with it? Do they even survive? Who are their venture capitalists, mom and dad?
Competing by price is the lazy marketers way of attracting customers. First of all, if you can not afford to offer web hosting at such a low price, why would you be tempted to offer it in the first place? In high hopes of up-selling your clients? Or perhaps because you think volume will make up for it?
Consider this: the people that pay the lowest prices for web hosting usually demand the most service. Lets be straight up about it: they are cheap customers. From the experiences of many web hosts who have learned their lesson after trying the ridiculously low pricing structure, it doesnt make sense to charge customers a low price if they demand the most of your time and resources. You lose money. And you will eventually lose customers. Not to mention the fact that you will not make money taking this route. Your business will fail.
What Makes Me Different?
Ask yourself that question: what makes me different? What makes you different? Why should a customer choose your web hosting service over another company’s web hosting service? Don’t you both offer the same service anyway?
If you fail to realize the fact that you need to do something different in order to survive in this business, it will take sheer luck for you to survive. If you’re like everyone else, chances are your business will fail. Your business plan should have outlined a marketing strategy, but you should have also considered the competition, and what it takes on your part to generate enough business to grown and prosper.
Service Differentiation
Essentially, every web host offers the same service in the perspective of the customer. They pay you to host their web site. Wow, big deal isn’t it? With this kind of thinking, your competitors are set to fail because all you have to do is set your service apart from everyone else. Begin by brainstorming to yourself or with your team. How can we differentiate our service enough so that customers can see our service as superior to that of our competitors?
You’ve probably seen many claims including 99.999% uptime guarantee, or 24/7 support. In reality, these hosting companies are differentiating their services, although many are quick to jump on the bandwagon. Can you deliver an uptime guarantee to your customers? Do you provide customer service and technical support 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
What do you provide that your competitors do not? Do you use a control panel that makes it easier for customers to manage the features of their web hosting account? Do you provide free antivirus software that protects their e-mail? Do you provide a solution to SPAM e-mail?
Differentiating your services simply takes a bit of creativity and being able to see your service in the eyes of your customer. What will excite them? What feature will switch them on and see you as the ultimate web hosting service provider? What will make your competitors envy you?
Brand Experience
Web hosting is not as dull a business as you think. In fact, it’s more than just hosting your customers’ web sites and hoping the server doesn’t crash. It takes more than answering the phone and helping them solve their technical problems.
The experience that your customers have with your company is one that is very important, and should be emphasized. The brand that you deliver to your customers is one they should feel strongly about, again, something that excites them every time they interact with it.
Start with your company name. Is it another one of those computer generated, high tech, dot com names, or did you actually think of something clever, something your customers can feel emotionally about? Now let’s have a look at your web site. Did you splash it together using bits and pieces from the web sites of other businesses, or did you do something unique, and make it easy for your customers to navigate?
Are your web hosting plans designed to suit the needs of your customers? Do they have enough choice? Your ordering process is it easy? Can customers order without running into problems or feeling inadequate? Can customers get in touch with someone if they are having difficulty?
When customers call for customer service or technical support, do friendly representatives answer the phone with a strong feeling of rapport with your customers? Do they genuinely care about the well being of your customers, ensuring that they do whatever it takes to keep them happy?
Let Them Talk
Unless your web hosting business is worth talking about, you will fail. The most effective way of promoting your business is out of your hands. It’s your customers that play an effective role in whether or not your business will succeed.
If your web host startup is just another mediocre, half-assed attempt to make money, or if it’s just a dedicated server sitting somewhere out there begging to be filled with data, you will fail. Nobody will even notice that you exist, regardless of how many ads you put up, how cheap your prices are and how technologically ingenious your team is.
The easiest way to get your business off the ground is to excite your customers and get them to talk about you. Think about it because it really is that simple. When was the last time you told a friend of yours about a product or service you really enjoyed?
Now, what can you do about your web host startup that will get customers to talk about you? How do you tickle them enough so that they get off their seat and tell just about everyone they know about how great your web host services are?
Copyright © 2004 Johnder Perez
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Johnder Perez writer for hire
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Posted in Interesting Internet & Hosting Marketing by .
I write this article especially for people who are new to web hosting. This is why I will only talk about the basic needs (in a shared hosting environment): space, bandwidth. Most of the people looking for advanced features (scripting, databases) already know what they want/need anyway.
So let’s start with the space. Web space (disk space) is the amount of data you can store on the hard disk of the web server. Each web hosting account comes with a certain amount of space, usually over 50 MB and less than 1000 MB.
Obviously, the amount of needed space depends on the size of the website. Most websites are composed of html (text) pages with a few images (gifs or jpegs) or even a little bit of Flash animation. Text is very economical; it occupies very little space. Images and flash are more expensive; they require a lot of space. If you’re new to the web you might think it’s great to have a lot of colorful images to make your website really beautiful. Don’t make this common mistake!
Your aim should be to say as much as you can on a page while maintaining it’s size under 50-60 KB including images. The reason? There are still lots of people using slow dial-up connections of under 56 Kbps. For them a 150 KB will take more that 21 seconds to load. A 60 KB page will take more than 8 seconds to load. That’s still a lot of time! A good page size is under 30 KB. A maximum page size is 50-60 KB.
Considering an average page size of 30 KB, you can put approximately 33 pages on 1Mb of space. If you have 10 MB of space available, you could host 330 pages. I only wish I had so many pages to put online. Don’t worry, I’m working on it!
The idea is this: unless you run a busy forum your needs for space are likely to be rather modest. Just keep in mind to achieve an average of 30KB/page and you should be more than fine even with 10 MB of web space.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that you’re allowed to transfer per month. It includes all uploads and downloads regardless of the protocol used (HTTP, FTP, POP etc.). Bandwidth depends very much on the average page size, but it also depends on the number of visitors your website will have and the average number of pages they visit. For an average page size of 30 KB, 20,000 visitors per month and 3 pages per visitor your website will need about 1800 MB (1.8 GB) of bandwidth per month. Most low cost hosting packages include that amount of bandwidth. Not to mention that 20,000 visitors per month is only a dream for most websites. Most don’t even have 2,000 visitors per month.
I took you through all those numbers just to give you an idea how to estimate your needs. If you’re just launching your website you will not need neither a huge amount of space, neither a huge amount of bandwidth. For 99% of people a hosting account with 10MB of space and 1Gb is more than enough.
Conclusion: Unless you have reasons to believe that your website will definitely have lots of visitors and unless you’ll offer movies or music for download (legally of course ), I see little reason for you to worry about space and bandwidth.
Just make your own calculations and also try to make sure that the host you choose allows account upgrades. That is to make sure you will be able to get more space and/or bandwidth if /when you need it without going through all the trouble of changing hosts.
Posted in Internet & Hosting Marketing by .
Jan 05
2
Replies by Amirul Mumineen (AS)
فيمن قال احب الفتنة وابغض الحق
في كتاب عجائب احكام امير المؤمنين ع م عن الاصبغ بن نباتة قال: قام رجل الى عمر بن الخطاب فقال: ياعمر ، انا رجل احب الفتنة ، وابغض الحق ، واشهد بما لم اره.
فقال عمر: قدموه ، فاضربوا عنقه.
فقدم، فاقبل امير المؤمنين ع م فقال: ما هذا ، يا عمر؟
فقال: انه ذكر: انه يحب الفتنة ، ويبغض الحق ، ويشهد بما لم يره. فقال علي ع م: اتركوه ، ثم قال: نعم ، اما قوله: احب الفتنة فانه يحب المال والولد ، واللّه يقول: انما اموالكم واولادكم فتنة.
واما قوله: ابغض الحق فانه يبغضالموت. واما قوله: واشهد بما لم اره فانه يشهد بان اللّه واحد ولم يره فقال عمر: خلوا سبيله.
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Disclaimer
Not all posts on this blog are my own words. Nor are all articles written by me. The blog is intended serve as my journal and dairy of interesting reading I have enjoyed and want to share. Some write-ups do not have the name of its author, the reason behind it is that I do not know the original source nor the author. If someone knows it they can add it to the comment box.
