Isam Bayazidi’s Blog

Since my last review of the Arabic blog services 2 months ago, a number of changes happened in those services, as well, Maktoob introduced their MaktoobBlog service. I wanted to revisit the the blog services, and take a look at maktoob’s offering. I will start with Jeeran and Maktoobblogs, as for Albawaba Blogs, I know that a lot of changes, updates and surprises are being cooked, so I will review it once it is released.

When I did my last review, Jeeran Blogs service was still very fresh, at that time they had some 9 available themes, now they provide 18 nice themes, as well it is now possible to change from the Hijri to the Gregorian calender with ease. A major feature that I noticed is the ability to add HTML code to the header, sidebar, or footer of your blog. Things that one could add include advertisements, image links to other sites, and so on.

Another feature, that I learned about, is that it is possible to have your own domain name for your own Jeeran blog. As Jeeran is a hosting service afterall, it is possible to have your blog under your own domain name (www.yourname.com). Since my last review, Jeeran introduced post categorization, even going further with providing feed per category. One downside is that a post must me in only one category, no more. So if you want to post about “Jordan” and “Technology” you have to select one of them, or create a new category “Jordan Technology”. Another thing that one could hope to see is the ability to make the theme or template unique, through changing colors, fonts, or maybe theme images. It is worth mentioning that Jeeran have proper and complete documentation, as well add to that,dedicated blogs in Arabic and English about blogging, and reporting latest updates of their service.

Now to the new visitor on the block, MaktoobBlog. Now Maktoob is no stranger for Arab internet users. They provided the first Webmail service with proper Arabic support back when using Arabic in emails was only a dream. As well, they are behind a number of innovative services such as CashU and Souq.com, today it is considered the largest Arab community site. Nevertheless, their entrance to the blogging field was a disappointing one for me. Maybe I had a much higher hope from a company like Maktoob.

I first learned about their service by a post from a post by Ahmad Humeid about Yaser AbuHilaleh’s blog in maktoob new service. Visiting AbuHilaleh’s blog, I noticed that it doesn’t look like a blog. To start with, the main page shows only one post, while it should show me the last N posts, or posts from the last N days. Looking on the sidebar, I saw checkboxes for categories, with a button under it for multiple selection. This is considered very much unlike blogs to say the least, one would expect either normal links, or at least a javascript that loads the page when one select a category. As well, testing it at that time, XML feed of the site seemed broken. I tried to move beyond the initial disappointment, and created an account, and looked deeply into the service.

Maktoobblogs provide a Blog Directory, which is a great way to navigate and discover new blogs to read. As well, a very interesting service, is notification. One could “subscribe” to any number of categories, and even type in keywords, and as soon as there is a blog or a post that matches the criteria, a user will be notified by email. This is a very interesting feature for the on-regular readers of the blogs, and want to be notified only when there is something that may be interesting to them. As well, looking now, XML feeds seems to work fine (Except that the Category Tag is very misplaced, their should be category tag per item, not a list of category tags for the feed as it is now.)

Looking from the Admin side of Maktoob blogs, I was disappointed to see that the post editor (WYSIWYG) doesn’t work with Firefox, this was a disappointment, specially that I know Maktoob was one of the first Arab companies to use Linux and Open Source. They provided some 15 nice themes for the blogs, as well, it is possible (from that I saw) to have blogs with multiple authors. Making it a great choice for groups who want to have blogs (classes, friends, family, etc..).

It is worth mentioning that MaktoobBlog successfuly attracted some known writers and journalist in the Arab world, which added a great value, and will gain exposure to blogging in the Arab world. It was a pleasure to see names like Umaimah Ahmad from BBC in Algeria, Ziad Abu Ghanemeh from Jordan, Yaser AbuHilaleh from Al-Jazeera Jordan, Ibrahim Gharaibeh and more in Maktoob Blogs, and I think that they will continue to attract more journalists, my hope is that they will fixup the service so that they won’t be driven away.
As well, that both services are having constant updates, so it is very likely that those problems and shortcomings mentioned here to be fixed very soon, then I guess I will raise the bars, and talk about other once considered advanced features that are getting to be more basic.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2006 at 12:34 pm and is filed under . You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.