Sahritna.com Unveils Next Evolution of Site feature and Design

Amman, Jordan — Dec 1^st, 2008 — Sahritna.com® today released a new, cleaner and simpler new design, along with the opportunity for users to preview the next-generation features and functionality. The company is inviting people to use the new design and try out the improved features and engage with the community. The new design is available to all of Sahritna’s more than 50,000 Arabic users and the new registered users over the coming days.

“Based on our vision to create a unique interactive Arabic community and the demand of our loyal users, we have launched a simpler and cleaner design in order to highlight the most recent and relevant information that users value” said Sahritna founder and CEO Bashar Shannak. “Sahritna’s new features make it a lot easier for users to share information and engage in the community.”

The company has been developing the new design since four months. Over the past two months, more than 3,000 Sahritna users offered constructive suggestions on the layout and features, many of which were included in the final version.

Public Profiles

Sahritna allowed its users to create their personal unique pages to deliver their information in a social context. The evolution of the public profiles focuses on user’s identity, their friends, post comments, mutual friends, rating and more. The profile now surfaces more current and pertinent information, about a user and their friends’ on Sahritna.

Profile Comments

Users have complete control over the comments published on their profile. Users are able to delete unwanted comments. And they can post comments on their profile and friend’s profiles.

User Rating

Located on the right hand of the user’s profile, the users are able to rate other users profiles in simple way. This feature enables users to know the popularity of their profile and how their friends think of them.

My Mood

It’s a mean for the user to express his/her current mood and tell his friends how he feels currently. Upon user login he will be able to express his/her mood.

Easier Site Navigation with Tabs

The top menu is similar to the old design and allows users to access their Profile, Friends, Chat, search and Inbox. The Profile is now split out into boxes:

• My Mood displays the user mood by text and smiley;

• My Info shows information about the user that doesn’t change frequently;

• My Interests shows user interests in creative way;

• About Me shows more information about user, this box enable the user to express himself.

• Comments display the other user’s comments and what they think about that user.

• My Friends features the user friends who accepted his friendship.

• Mutual Friends features all of the friends who are common the user and the selected profile.

Customized Avatars

Users will have the option to customize their avatar using powerful technology. In which they can change hair, eyes, mouth, clothes and shoes. This feature enables users to show their style and beliefs.

Unique Interactive Chat Rooms

Chat rooms are more tightly integrated into Sahritna in order to make new friends. Users will have the option to interact with random online users or to interact with their existing friends. The visual rooms are created dynamically to give the users the feel that they are chatting in real rooms. The user can listen to music while chatting.

About Sahritna.com

Founded in February 2008, Sahritna’s mission is to make the Arabic world more open and transparent by giving people the power to share. Anyone can sign up for Sahritna and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Sahritna is a privately-held company and is headquartered in Amman, Jordan.

sahritna.com it's my surprise

Hi All,

it takes me a long time to come with these ideas that i implemented in http://www.sahritna.com.
so please guys vistied this social network and give me your feed back.

Maria Engine Will Rock...

Maria Preview i's a big step from mysql AB before sun Acquisition, when MySQL going forward to enhance their engines.

Maria is a crash safe version of MyISAM. The Maria storage engine supports all of the main functionality of the MyISAM engine, but includes recovery support (in the event of a system crash), full logging, all MyISAM row formats and a new Maria specific row format.

So we'll say goodbye for crashed tables finally !!!.

what the most interesting thing in this engine that Maria Engine support transactional | non-transactioal data, which means that Maria engine can merge both MyISAM and InnoDB Engine.

Data in Maria tables is stored in three files:

• table.frm — the standard MySQL FRM file containing the table definition.
• table.MAD — the Maria data file.
• table.MAI — the Maria index file.
• maria_log.???????? — the Maria log file.
• maria_log_control — a control file that holds information about the current state of the Maria engine.

maria log file is named numerically and sequentially, with new files automatically created when the log file limit has been reached. You can control the log file size using maria_log_file_size option, and control the deletion of logs using maria_log_purge_type.


How Maria Engine Different from MyISAM Engine:

• Two types of tables are supported. Non-crash safe tables (non-transactional) are written immediately to their corresponding data file. Transactional tables are crash safe and data is written into the Maria log. For more information on the log.
• Maria supports auto-recovery in the event of a crash.
• Maria supports a single writer and multiple readers. The writer supports both INSERT and UPDATE operations. MyISAM supports only concurrent INSERT and SELECT statements.
• Maria provides a new row format, PAGE.
• Maria supports crash-safe operations over many statements by enclosing statements within LOCK TABLES and UNLOCK TABLES statements.

So as we can predict easily a very success future for this Engine if it treated carefully, this Engine is still in Alpha version, and you can find it with MySQL 5.1 binaries and rpms. for more details on this pretty engine found here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1-maria/en/se-maria.html

Be aware!!! you have unclean backups

As any database administrator trying to keep the data clean, up to date, optimized, and also safe by taking backups and transfer these backups to another machine.

And all we know that we have more than backup plan depends on the database engine used, and I mentioned these strategies mysql-backup-techniques early.

Most of us use mysqlhotcopy perl script to take backups for 100% myisam database, which is perfect script, and better than mysqldump utility in some cases.

Mysqlhotcopy will create version of you database folder based on Numofversions parameter, let’s have an example of database “world” with 5 versions

drwxr-x--- 2 buser buser 12288 Jan 9 02:00 world.1

drwxr-x--- 2 buser buser 12288 Jan 8 02:00 world.2

drwxr-x--- 2 buser buser 12288 Jan 7 02:00 world.3

drwxr-x--- 2 buser buser 12288 Jan 6 02:00 world.4

drwxr-x--- 2 buser buser 12288 Jan 5 02:00 world.5

As we can see here we have 5 versions of backup and the oldest backup is before 5 days, fine for me, so if explore inside the any folder we’ll see all the tables in your database, each table has 3 files (.frm, .MYD, and .MYI) for (table definition file, data file, and index file) which mysql create for every table.

So let’s explore another version, aha as I expect same files because I didn’t create new tables, but I can see the differences between data file for one table and same table in another version. So there was some insertion on this table today, catch ya ;) !!

So I decided to move my backups to another machine using rsync utility, it’s a amazing tool in fact, because I can transfer the differences only to remote machine after I have the versions there, which will save me time and bandwidth.

But what I found later, something surprises me, when I delete records in the local server it’ll removed from the data file, and when I took backups the new version will be clean from the deleted data, no problem and everything is ok till now, but when I transfer these backups to the remote machine it’s just transfer the new and updated data, and keep the deleted rows in the file, so after two weeks I have different copy from what I have in the local server, I have all the new data and all the deleted data also, which means that I don’t have clean copies in other machine except the local.

Although I’m using rsync command with these options ‘z’,’a’,’v’,’r’,’e’ the shell considered the update ‘u’ just the updated and inserted data, because it’s check on the timestamp and the size of the file.

so be aware from unclean data in your backups, because you may want it clean and update to date, like i know, so in the next post i'll tell you the ways to fix that problem.