The title is a misquote of George Orwell’s quote from Animal Farm

All animals are equal – but some animals are more equal than others

We tend to think of browsers as a utility and don’t really care what version it is when viewing a web page

Unfortunately, the most common browser (and probably the one you are using right now) Internet Explorer 6 is also the least secure as well has a number of bugs whilst rendering web pages that it degrades the user experience. IE6 was launched in 2001 and due to its default install on Windows based computer pretty much dominant status till recently. Microsoft for various reasons had disbanded the IE development till recently and this led to the browser being very susceptible to security flaws which were actively exploited to install malware.

Over the last few years, there has been growing interest in alternatives for IE6 as individuals and corporations have realised that that its not worth putting all your eggs in one basket. This has led to innovation in terms of web standards and an improved user experience.

Microsoft has also responded to market pressure and customer demand and restarted IE development. They have launched Internet Explorer 7 which fixes a number of bugs in the IE6 engine as well as provides improved security. Security improvments come in the form of a built in phishing filter, opt-in ActiveX, an always available address bar so you know where the window is being launched form.

User experience improvements are provided in the form of tabbed window support, easy auto discovery of RSS feeds (we @ mumineen.org use RSS feeds extensively), integrated web search in the default toolbar , bug fixes to many rendering issues which make life for a web developer much simpler because they no longer have to spend time working around IE6 defeciencies but instead can focus on developing a better product

IE7 has been out for nearly 2 years and there have also been alternative browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari available which have similar features. Unfortunately our statistics show that nearly 40% of visits to our website come from IE6 so users haven’t upgraded either to IE7 or any alternative browsers

The advantage of Firefox and Opera is that they are cross platform so if you are using Mac OSX or Linux then you have that browser available to you.

We want to take this opportunity to encourage our userbase to switch away from IE6 to any of the better alternatives namely IE7, Firefox, Opera, Safari for a more secure and better browsing experience and as such we have coded a subtle message on our website specific to IE6 users encouraging them to take the plunge

If you have switched away from IE6, we applaud your judgement and hope that you will assist other mumineen in making that switch. Let’s use the mantra

Friends don’t let friends use IE6

Mumineen.org has opened a Twitter account which can be seen here:

http://www.twitter.com/mumineen

What is Twitter, you may ask? Here is the answer from the Twitter FAQ:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twiter works as a micro-blog, in which entries are limited to 140 characters. When you sign up for a twitter account, you can make entries (called tweets) via the web interface, via a chat message, or even by SMS. In addition to making your own tweets, you can follow other friends who have accounts, and they can follow you. The net effect is to create a kind of public conversation between friends, online.

The way that Mumineen.org is using Twitter is to auto-post the RSS feeds from our Akhbar of Huzurala TUS, our News of Bilad Imaniyah, World Bohra Headlines, Featured Photos, and this very techblog. Each of these sources of content from Mumineen.org are prefixed so it is easy to tell which is which (AKHBAR, BILAD, NEWS, PHOTOS, and TECH, respectively).

If you have a twitter account (and we highly recommend you sign up!) then you can simply follow us, and you will then automatically be notified whenever we have new content in our stream. You can even setup your twitter account so that tweets from Mumineen.org are sent via SMS to your cell phone, for free. Or, you can simply subscribe to our Mumineen.org Twitter RSS feed in your favorite feed reader.

We think Twitter is an amazing tool, and we intend to leverage it for max benefit of our community. So, if you are already a Twitter user, follow us, and if not, then sign up today!

Here’s a preview of our Twitter Feed:

Mumineen.org offers the ability to syndicate its content to other websites or blogs with Javascript. All that’s required for you to do is to cut and paste some HTML onto your site. Your content will stay current, updating the same second we update ours.

To put headlines from our Huzurala TUS Akhbar, Bilaad Imaniyah Akhbar and Announcements sections on your site or blog, you simply need to add the code below to your web page where you would like the syndicated headlines to appear. There are two formats to choose from, one that provides an unordered HTML list (encapsulated within <ul> </ul> tags) of headlines only and another that generates an unordered HTML list of the headlines along with an abstract.

1. For Akhbar of Huzurala (TUS)

Headlines only
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.mumineen.org/jsFeed.php?category=huzurala-tus" type="text/javascript"></script>

Headline and Abstract
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.mumineen.org/jsFeed.php?category=huzurala-tus&abstract=yes" type="text/javascript"></script>

2. For Akhbar al-Bilad

Headlines only
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.mumineen.org/jsFeed.php?category=bilad-imaniyah" type="text/javascript"></script>

Headline and Abstract
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.mumineen.org/jsFeed.php?category=bilad-imaniyah&abstract=yes" type="text/javascript"></script>

3. For Announcements

Headlines only
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.mumineen.org/jsFeed.php?category=announcements" type="text/javascript"></script>

Headline and Abstract
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.mumineen.org/jsFeed.php?category=announcements&abstract=yes" type="text/javascript"></script>

4. For Salaat Timings

Copy the following code on your Jamaat’s website replacing ‘yourcity’ with valid locations (example: mumbai, houston, london…)

<!-- Begin Namaaz Times --><script language="javascript" src="http://services.mumineen.org/components/salaat_table_js.html?s_city=yourcity"> </script><!-- End Namaaz Times -->

The salaat syndication can easily be stylized using CSS.

Note: You should be aware of the following inherent Javascript weaknesses when you use Javascript syndication:

• JavaScript depends on the user’s browser: if JavaScript is not enabled your content will not appear. People with disabilities will not have access to the content
• Search engines will not index the syndicated content.
• If your users are browsing with a device other than a computer such as PDA, mobile phone or Web-on-TV system – then their devices may not have javascript functionality.

The Mumineen.org team is in the process of making changes to the infrastructure that powers our site. The benefits are a centralized engine for processing akhbar and news, and increased use of RSS feeds to power the front page. We have also made enhancements to the salaat timing code and will be introducing a new combined miqat/calendar tool soon.

You may notice some temporarily broken links and reduced website functionality. We are working to bring missing features back online as soon as possible. Please email us at webmaster@mumineen.org if you have any difficulties, especially with salaat timings hosted on your own websites.

After our server meltdown, we’re taking a hard look at what direction our services should take in the future. We know what we like to see, but at the same time we know we’re not representative of those who visit our site. We’d really like to get some feedback from our readers. What parts of Mumineen.org do you like? What do you want to see more of? What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Comments are open.

UPDATE: In light of the comments we’re receiving, we would like to reiterate our policy that mumineen.org does not answer questions relating to fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) or provide online sabaq. For questions of this nature, please contact your local raza na saheb.

In a previous post, we identified that our userbase wants to download content such as audio and video of various miqats and of Aqa Maula (TUS) to their local machine. It’s only community sites such as Sautul Iman who want to stream their content due to their need to protect their IP and their revenue stream. Whether they do streaming the right way or not is a discussion for another time.

So, you dear reader come across our site and start clicking on our audio, video links to initiate the download and playback. As you must realize, this data is fairly large in size and there are limits even when you send cache friendly headers since few proxy caches will cache large files. Thus the question arises, what’s a good technique to share lots of large files amongst a community.

The answer is Bittorrent. Bittorrent a peer-to-peer file sharing mechanism has been generating a lot of buzz for its ability to share large files with a much reduced bandwidth strain to the hoster and it scales better as more and more people look for the same content.

However the user is still waiting to click on the torrent link so what’s the solution to this.

Let’s step back a bit and look at something we view everday, yes it’s the device known as the idiot box. What it provides is the ability to tune to channel and periodic download of content. Is there such an equivalent in the computer world.

The answer is RSS 2.0 enclosures. As the previous link states

First, RSS and BitTorrent complement each other naturally. RSS was designed to report freshly available content, which is exactly where BitTorrent shines. RSS 2.0 enclosures were designed to automate the download process that BitTorrent optimizes.

Think of the possibility, as a user one would just subscribe to the Ashara news feed and the content would be on the desktop regularly. Since there would be a lot of interest in our community for this feed, the Bittorrent swarm would be buzzing and downloads will occur very rapidly.

Similary, one could subscribe to audio feeds categorised by naats,marthiya or zakereen groups.

An excellent Bittorrent client which has good support for RSS enclosures is utorrent. Interested community members are encouraged to play around with the above idea and demonstrate a prototype.

Our community the Dawoodi Bohras regularly publishes CD’s whether they are from Sautul Iman or CD’s published by various zakereens or even audio CD’s containing nasihaats such as “Allah Taala na Hamd’, ‘Biraadar tu Nasihaat sun’.

What we lack is information about the tracks on the CD’s being published to sites such as Gracenote and FreeDB which would allow listeners from our community to download the track information and other metadata into their players.

Players such as iTunes make it very easy to enter the information into the Gracenote database and there are tons of tools which allow for entering the information into the FreeDB database.

This is a simple project for someone or a group of people who have the original CD’s to help provide accessible metadata to a wider audience. If your zakereen group has compiled a CD containing your group renditions of marthiya, you owe it to the mumineen you might be selling or gifting the CD that the track information is in both Gracenote and FreeDB.

Our community, the Dawoodi Bohras have a rich and varied oral tradition which is expressed in the forms of qasidas, marthiyas, naats, munajaats and the recital of Quran-e-Majeed. Over the years, we have tried to aggregate examples of our oral tradition and made them available at our audio site.

On our audio site, at present we request samples to be made available in WAV format. We would really prefer any loseless encoding instead of WAV whether its FLAC, WavPack, Monkeys Audio and many others.

Please understand that formats like MP3, AAC (Advanced Audio Codec, used in iPods) and Windows Media Audio are known as lossy codecs in the sense that they lose some information from the original CD recording in order to be able to compress the file to approx 10% of the original size. They use lots of fancy algorithms to create the perception that the sound is as close to the original as possible.

But nobody in their right mind would use a lossy encoding as their master source, hence the requirement of loseless codec which as their name suggests do not lose any information yet are able to compress the original file size albeit to only about 50% of the original size.

In terms of delivering our content, we provide at times two links one named ‘Download’, the other named ‘Listen’. Frankly, from a user experience point of view this is not right. The intent is to ‘listen’ always so what does ‘download’ indicate. It’s primarily historical. The content team wanted to provide what in the industry is known as ’streaming’. That’s what the ‘Listen’ link intention is. Users would click on the link and their player would launch and play the file whereas with the ‘Download’ link would just download the file on the users desktop.

With todays proliferation of freely available media players and their tight integration with web browsers the ‘Download’ link really doesn’t work since it too launches the player and plays the file.

True streaming refers to the ability to play audio as the data is coming in over the network so one doesn’t have to wait for the entire download. We really don’t do true streaming, since if you observe carefully we generate a .RAM file which is a real-audio metafile that points to the .rm file.

We also serve this file via the HTTP protocol. Delivering Real Audio files over HTTP has quite a few limitations including one that requires the entire content be downloaded before it can be played and if someone has the illusion that it prevents the content to be stored on the end user machine then that person should not complain when their DRM intentions are bypassed

In order to do true streaming, we would need to setup a streaming server such as the Helix Server, Quicktime Streaming Server or Windows Media Server.

Users would like the ability to store the audio/video content we provide locally so they can listen to it without needing the ability to be connected to our server. The ‘Listen’ link we currently provide is an anachronism.

In a future post, we’ll discuss some interesting ideas on delivering large content rapidly to a userbase.

We are for some hardware so that we can run our mailing list engine on a separate box so as not to cause sysadmin grief when running multiple MTA’s on the same OS instance. It’s not that it’s not possible to run such a setup but such things are best left to people who run mail systems for a living. Also separating our mailing list from our website in terms of boxes gives us some form of resilience in case one box croaks. Some of you may have observed that our existing site including jamaat mailing lists were down for a fair bit, this was due to our existing Pentium II box not being available. Hopefully the new hardware can be provisioned quickly. The PII box is being pushed to its edge and our userbase can be inconvenienced if the box is down again.

Whilst we are waiting for the hardware, let’s take the opportunity to talk about some of the services we provide today, discuss what’s good/bad about them. Throw some new ideas into the mix and see where this leads towards. Remember that mumineen.org cannot always be expected to come up with an end2end implementation. The community must step up to the plate.

Extract of mail traffic summary

Per-Day Traffic Summary
 date       received  delivered   deferred    bounced   rejected
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Nov 20 2005       83         22         0        0         420
  Nov 21 2005      398        181         0        0         690
  Nov 22 2005      150         59         0        0        5169
  Nov 23 2005      433        231         0        0        7517

delivered email includes verp bounces. but realistically the main list only receives 2-3 messages a day, jamaat lists a few more. So assume that only around 10 “real” messages flow through our server/day.

So what happened, Sober struck again and one of our main mechanisms to survive was our plain-text only policy.

Now would be a good time to tell your friends and family to