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Assalamu alaykum everyone!

As we all know it’s getting harder and harder for our Muslim youth to maintain their Islamic faith in this western society, especially when the subject of relationships & Marriage comes along. It often helps when our children are able to communicate in honesty with their parents and when parents are not so ‘restrictive’ in their children’s choice of spouse.

Well we have some VERY good news for Muslim parents & youth that have reached this understanding and who are looking for a different & simpler solution to complete their deen.

Our much loved & respected brother Baba Ali, after having gone through the internet marriage process himself many years ago has now launched a new Muslim Matrimonial site called HalfOurDeen.com. Although our brother Ali maybe better known as our hilariously funny Muslim comedian, the mastermind behind Ummah Films reminder videos and the star of the popular internet series of ‘Ask Baba Ali’ he has also come to serve as an important voice for the American Muslim community and the whole Ummah in general altogether forming a strong bond of trust & respect for his no nonsense straight to the point image.

His new Matrimonial site HalfOurDeen.com is exactly that, straight to the point and no nonsense and here are just some of the points that distinguishes it from your average Muslim Matrimonial site:

1.  The site is completely private.  Isn’t that great! This means no more worrying about your friends, family or local community viewing your details on the web.

2.  The cost to register is peanuts compared to your average matrimonial site – HalfOurDeen.com and you’re not forced to register before finding out the fees, they have a link to the price page to prevent any waste of time.

3.  They have this cool compatibility % thing; you take a series of tests that let them know more about you and the person you’re looking for.  Thus, when you view someone’s profile, you see a % match you have with that person.  The questions are divided into categories so you can see how much you have in common in things like religion, family, personality, etc…

4.  Marriage videos – I think this was a fantastic idea and it’s so unique mashallah, and as Baba Ali himself quotes “ The divorce rate for Muslims here in the west has reached 31%.Unfortunately we rarely hear advice or tips about marriage during Jummah or from our parents so I decided to make a series of videos explaining what to expect when you get married.  My goal with Half Our Deen isn’t just to help people find each other but more importantly stay together InshAllah.  Whatever I gain from this project, I cannot take to my grave and therefore, I hope there is hasanat in this project.”

Well Alhamdulillah I’m happily married but I’d love to get my hands on the marriage videos, I get the feeling their just as entertaining as they are beneficial

Here is the link to the new site:  http://www.halfourdeen.com

I would urge everybody to watch  this video explaining some of the sites original & unique features in more detail:

If you have any comments please share them with us. Jazakallahu khayran.

Wassalamu alaykum.

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If you are anything like me you will have multiple social networks where you connect with friends and see what is new with them.  Wouldn’t it be nice to go to one place and see everything there laid out nicely in front of you?  Well, there have been lots of attempts to integrate variety of networks together in one super duper aggregator and Skimmer is the newest addition.

Skimmer is an Adobe Air desktop app for Mac and PC that allows you to integrate your Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Blogger accounts into one good looking platform.

Skimmer beta was released in March 2009 to mixed but overall positive reviews here is a brief summary of those positive and negative thoughts on the web:

Negative:

• Bit sluggish
• Little buggy
• Jack of all trades, master of none
• Only 5 networks to choose from
• Takes up lots of memory

Positive:

• Looks great
• Alter colour scheme
• Easy to access networks
• Uncluttered

Overall we think Skimmer is pretty good but if you’re one of those chaps/ladies that spend more time on Twitter and Facebook then TweetDeck is a better option for you.

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Do you ever go on dodgy websites, controversial blogs or wish you could leave no trail when buying and selling online?  You may even go to completely acceptable websites and blogs but just dont want people to be able to trace your movements, enter QtWeb 2.0.

The QtWeb 2.0 is an open source browser built on the Nokia Qt framework…a rare thing indeed for browsers…and it seems that it can offer you the kind of safe haven you need.

Here area few privacy and security features you may like

• Turn on Private Browsing mode to avoid leaving traces of browsing, even UserAgent which is being sent to the web server is masked
• Full Reset feature – clears all caches and restores all local settings to the state just after installation, as it was never run on the machine
• Supported SSL to access secure sites.

Other than the impressive safety features on QtWEB 2.0 it has a Firefox type appearance and is a compact and portable web browser. It has a customizable user interface, its lightweight, fast and portable.

QtWeb 2.0 includes customizable menus, hot keys, keyboard shortcuts, toolbar buttons and search providers.

It won’t change the world and people will not be jumping all over it but for those who want security when online and want to stop your information being leaked this is a good option for you.

Download it here

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After learning about Google Squared I thought what else could Google possibly do in with “search?” At first glance Google Squared looks typically basic for a Google app, Google are great at minimalist design and this is no different.

What they are trying to do with this new feature is grab all those pieces of data that are swimming along the internet, like space debris, and present relevant information to you in a very “excel spread sheet” type arrangement.

I had a go and entered the search term “Prophet Muhammad” and it turned out these results:

Generally the search results are ok; I believe that it needs more work so that it presents more relevant results.

Google Squared has the potential to be a very important part of the Google App Empire with massive take up; for now, I’ll just wait for the updates before I begin using it.

Take a peek at their YouTube promo

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Not sure about the name “Bing” they could have done much better with that but actually, Bing looks good at first glance, there are nice images on the front page of whales,  it is fresh and its layout is nice and clean – so far, so good.

Searching on Bing isn’t too bad either, I typed in “Book” and the page displayed relevant categories on the left which others do not have, it even gave me an option to log onto Facebook.  Very sweet.

However, if you are expecting this to the engine that knocks Google of its perch then you may have to rethink because from what I can make out there is nothing that Bing offers that could alter peoples search engine preferences,  I really like the image search though.

This is their how their search results are displayed

Honestly, there is just too much to talk about and I need to dig deeper to provide a detailed review but if you want a comparison between Google and Bing in search results, take a look at this article

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There seems to be a lot of chat about Seesmes Desktop at the moment and they say it even tops Tweetdeck…hmm.  I haven’t tried it yet,  it needs to be pretty good to top Tweetdeck with al its great features, but I like what I am hearing.

This is their promo video, i’m off to download it and try it out….

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A really good browser comparison video that compares Firefox and IE 8.

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If you are anything like me you will be deeply in love with Firefox, its clean, has great themes, easy to use, quick and has fantastic add-ons.  It seems a long time ago now that IE was the big kid in the school yard, things have moved on since those days and now savvy surfers don’t even give it a second thought.

I have just added some plugins to Firefox 3 and I must say, they’re fab, but here are my top 3 Firefox Add-ons of 2009:

Shareaholic

This is one add-on that I love too much and I wonder how manged to get by without it.  If you use multiple social media networks and love to bookmark and share content then this is one add-on you cannot miss out on.  By simply clicking the icon on your toolbar you can share your content on a wide selection of sites such as Twitter, Digg, Facebook and Gmail. Download

Feedly

As a avid user of Google Reader I was really please to fall upon this great add-on from Firefox.  It pulls all of your feeds form Google Reader, places them in your catagories in a really eye catching, user friendly platform that also intergrates your Twitter, YouTube, Delicious and Friendfeed accounts.  You can share content with absolute ease on your other networks, its just great.  Download

Prayer times

This add-on is a couple of years old but for those who don’t know, this is a simple  and extremely useful add-on that calculates your location and displays the prayer times according to your school of jurisprudence.  When you are sat in front of your computer at work and at home it is easy to get distracted, this add-on is a perfect reminder.  It will always be one of my favourites, whatever year. Download