Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Its been a long time since I did any updates on my blog and installed any new plugins and since I am seriously back to blogging now, I thought its time to upgrade my wordpress installation to the latest 2.9 version.

I will be posting monthly or bi-monthly blog update posts depending on the activity that takes place on my blog, I will be noting down Feed subscribers, traffic and blog revenue and any other updates such as plugin installations.

RSS Feed Subscribers

I added the feedburner chicklet today, and as you can see I only have 3 RSS subscriber, lol, on my defense, I haven’t been a constant blogger for along time, and I never really focused on promoting my blog or encouraging readers to subscribe to it, but all of that is going to change! why? well one part of it is that I plan to be way more active on my blog, secondly i am going to start a blog contest!

The blog Contest

The contest is very simple, signup to my RSS feeds and get a chance to win one of the following:

• $50 prize sent to your paypal account.
• Any template if your choosing from ThemeForest.
• 6 months free shared hosting account on any of their plans from my good friends at  MellowHost.
• 3 Link placement on any of the u4media blogs for 2 months, free!

More prizes might be added if I get any friends to sponsor it, if anyone is interested, shoot me an email.

Note: The contest will be running for 2 weeks. You need to leave a comment on this post to be entered and contacted if you won.

Blog Updates and plugins

As I mentioned above, I just upgraded my blog  to the latest wordpress version, its always best to update your blog right when a new version is out, simply because a new version is released either because there was an exploit that was found and fixed or there was a new feature or enhancement that was added, in either case you should install the latest version right away.

In other updates I added Mybloglog to the sidebar, I’ve been along time member at Mybloglog and I’ve had their widget on my old theme, but I didn’t add it again when I switched themes.

I also installed a number of very useful plugins that I would like to share with you:

1- TweetMeme

You may have noticed that retweet button added to each post, this very useful since it allows your readers to quickly retweet your content, its always a good idea to make it easier for people to share your content, you can download the Tweetmeme plugin here.

2- Comment Relish

This was a plugin recommended by PluginId, what it does is send an email to people who comment on your blog for the 1st time, usually thanking them for commenting and encouraging them to signup to your blog, feeds or email newsletter, you can download comment relish here.

While making sure of the download page I came across a blog post on Siteguide that gives 3 reasons against using comment relish, while blogs such as Problogger recommend this plugin, each side has a good view on things but I still think its a very good plugin especially if you keep the email it sends simple, not annoying and not too needy.

3- Add to any

Just as the Tweetmeme button is a good idea, these share/save buttons you see at the end of each post is a great idea as well, it makes  sharing your posts and content much easier for your readers, which is always beneficial for you. The plugin allows users to share your content on more than 50 social bookmarking/networking websites,  you can download the Add to any plugin here.

4- Enhanced WordPress contact form

As you can guess from the name, this plugin adds a nice contact form for your blog, its installation is extremely easy, it literally took me 3 minutes to install it and update my contacts page, you can download the plugin here

5- My Top Commentators

This plugin is only viewable in the admin side, where it displays the top commentors on your blog, very useful to find out who they are, you can view them based on a number of time frames, today, last 7 days, this month, this year etc. installing it is also very easy. You can download Commentators here.

I am glad to inform you that Medievilwars was reviewed in one of the top online gaming magazines, Thirteen1 which is an online gaming magazine which you can read the full contents of the magazine online!

Its a very interesting concept if you ask me, its the 1st magazine that I saw so far that provides its full contents on the web, they also have an interviews section and an active forum.

You can check out the detailed review here, btw the game got a score of 10 out of 13 which is pretty cool!

Below are screen shots of the 2-page review.

I was thinking of what my next post should be, and I decided to share some images for our offices in Amman, I took these images from my mobile phone so they are not of extreme how quality!

Our logo and main office entrance!

The guys working !

More guys working and our whiteboard!

And finally our meeting room

The office space is quickly diminishing so were actually thinking of expanding the space in the coming months, these sort of issues are new to me and anyone else that is used to work from home or working at a company,  anyways hope you enjoyed the images!

Been busy the past couple of days with a number of things including the new WizardsProductions website which is the gaming company setup in Jordan, the website is still missing some pages but they are not important ones, all the main pages are up there, the content was written by one of the partners in the company and he did a pretty good job in my opinion.

Keep in mind that this is a corporate website and not a gaming site, we were wondering for quite some time which approach should we take with the website, should we keep it corporate? or add some a gaming touch to it? we finally decided to go corporate and save the gaming portal look for another project.

I’ve went through a number of stages that ended up with these theme:

1- The 1st thing I did was a wordpress blog using a paid gaming template, you can check it out here.

2- The egamer theme we used didnt have all the functionality we did, so we went custom and got a custom design made, html’d it and used it for a couple of months, however the design didnt meet what we wanted (not sure why we didnt decide on that sooner before going through the trouble of creating the whole website)

3- Bought the paid template you see now on the website which looks very good in my opinion, I did go through allot of templatemonsters as well but we didnt like any of them, they all the same!!

During my 6 years of working online and launching websites, I’ve learned that going custom is usually the best thing to do, this also depends on many variables mainly your budget and the project itself, however using a template that delivers the end result is also a smart choice.

Btw, what do you think of the Wizards logo below? this was custom made by a Jordanian designer we hired locally, he did quite a good job in my opinion!

Great news today, Arabcrunch one of the biggest blogs covering Arabic related tech news has reviewed WizardsProductions the company I co-founded 8 months ago, the review covers a breif history about the company as well the current project of the company, I am very excited about this review as it wil definitely help the company get more exposure.

Arabcrunch recently broke the news of  Yahoo’s acquisition of Maktoob.com and was mentioned in Reuters for breaking it, the blog also had a video interview with Yahoo’s VP for emerging markets and Samit Toukan Maktoob’s co-founder.

You can find our review here!

I received the preview of the new design that my partner is working on today, and boy was I impressed, the new theme is going to be an excellent move towards the revamp I talked about earlier, this theme is way fresher and I just love it. Check out the below low quality preview!

Of course the network home revamp isnt just a pretty design, lots of new updates are going in the design such as member profiles and a social networking system.

On another note, I currently have 87 followers on twitter, which isnt bad in my opinion considering for being there for 5 days, twitter is a great marketing tool so far with lots of potential however its filled with spam, which brings me Twitblock, you can learn more about their service on this Rev2 review,  basically it helps allot with clearing spam profiles in your twitter follower list. Hope it helps you get rid of the spam in your twitter account!

I’ve been extremely busy in the past weeks in the ongoing revamp of Go3 Media, the revamp is taking place in the games under the network and for the network website as well, most of the games under the network are being revamped and enhanced, here is a quick walk through the updates on the games.

1- Hitmanslife

New theme has been launched for the game, the updates that went online are small updates of whats to come, more inside pages are being revamped both in their UI and their features.

2- Mafiacorruption

A major revamp for this game is underway and is progressing well, the complete game is being changed and overhauled to new standards, members of this game will be shocked with the new version which should be launching at the 1st of Oct.

3-  Medievilwars

The game name has been changed, server 2 has been open for the public for a couple of weeks now, the game home page has also been launched, were currently working on more enhancements and additions on the in-game features.

4- Go3 site

Our help desk and network bar have been launched on the site as well as the go3 blog which i am currently handling its updates, more updates for the go3 site are being developed and should be launching soon.

I’ve also been extremely busy with the Arabic games that we’ve been launching at Wizards Productions, which is a new company I’ve co-founded in Jordan.

I am very excited about this post, this has been a project that I’ve been working on for a couple of months, as you all probably know, Facebook Apps is a great medium to spread your game, website or idea, thats why I’ve planned to launch a facebook application version of Mafia Corruption, especially that the current well known Mafia apps on facebook are simple compared to the features offered on Mafia Corruption.

The app has been online for almost 2 weeks now, did some small advertising to get some users in and test the waters, now that the app is ready to receive more members, your all welcomed to check it out and play the Mafia Corruption Application!

I got some new banners designed as well for the app, check them out below!

We launched Topfreemmorpg.com 2 days ago, the website is a Top Free MMORPG list where game owners can submit their websites to the list and have their users vote for their listing, rankings change depending on the amount of votes the website gets.

With the launch of the Topfreemmorpg Go3 Media expands its network to 8 websites, all gaming related!

We are currently looking to advertise the directory on gaming related websites, if you have anything that fits the aucdience please email me at sohaib[at] go3 . net