The Daily Dinar

For Muslim blogs interested in moneterizing their site there are two principle hurdles to the use of contextual advertising, such as Google Adsense. The first is that the advertisters who explicitly target placement on Islamic or Muslim websites are often promoting ideas that many Muslims would find objectionable, such as advertisements for books and websites critical of Islam. The second issue is that the ads that do appear are often extremely low paying. Therefore, most Muslim bloggers or webmasters would decide that the ‘cost’ of cluttering their site with ads is much greater than the likely revenue.

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Looking for a new career? How about a new new career? CNN Money list five of the hottest new new jobs these days:

1. Disease Mapper;
2. Robot Programmer;
3. Information Engineer;
4. Radiosurgeon;
5. Second Life Lawyer (we’re not joking).

//Engtech have an excellent list of tips to help you get more done in less time. It’s all worth reading and valuable, but our favourite is number three — use technology efficiently — as it is something that is often overlooked in many of these sorts of lists that one sees. And when it comes to efficient browsing, we recommend Firefox+Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to basically script the way Firefox displays webpages and interacts with them. It’s incredibly versatile and one can find many, many scripts to do all sorts of things. Some of the more useful are Google Autopager, Textarea Backup, Lookitup, Linkify, and Download Video.

Want to buy Mecca? Well, that will be $1,000. Dubai? That will be a bargain at just $50,000.

This is Weblo, supposedly one of the hottest trends on the internet at the moment, self-describing itself as monopoly on steroids. Created by Rocky Mirza, the site allows users to buy, sell and develop virtual properties, countries, states cities, and virtual domain names. By developing your property, you are able to make money from it. The Weblo site explains:

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The Wall Street Journal have a piece about building an e-commerce website and how costs might be kept down for startups or businesses just entering the marketplace.

Hiring a Web developer to build an e-commerce site from scratch can cost at least $5,000, and often far more. But there are cheap alternatives for those willing to do much of the setup themselves — many of which don’t require much time or technical savvy.

They go on to list some possibilities, such as TemplateMonster and some of the canned e-commerce solutions offered by large ISPs and domain registration services. There are, however, a lot more options for people looking to get their websites up quickly and cheaply.

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If people misspell words on ebay they will often not appear in user searches. For example, a person might list an Apple Eyepod instead of an Apple Ipod. As a result, these auctions don’t attract the same degree of attention as those with correctly spelled named: people just can’t find them. This means a low number of bids and the opportunity to pick up something for less than it might have gone for otherwise.

Whilst that may be bad for them, it’s good for the ebay shopper and a number of innovative search engines have appeared to take advantage of the situation. Hidden Auction and Missing Auctions are two great services that let you search ebay for listings with misspelled titles or product names.

Calculating the nisab of zakat can be confusing. Islamic Law, etc have published simple instructions to make it much easier for Muslims to work out whether they must pay zakat on their savings.

1. Gold and Silver are sold in Troy ounces.
2. one gram equals 0.03215 troy ounce
3. Let the daily bid price be P
4. Let the Nisab be N
5. Let the current cash value of Nisab be C
6. (P * .03215) * N = C

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Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those who lost loved ones in the Virginia Tech massacre. Each and every lost life is a tragedy.

There was, among the victims, a young Muslim graduate student named Waleed Shaalan. Muslim Matters have a tribute post for people to post their condolances and Tariq Nelson has information on how one can donate to help the wife and child that Waleed leaves behind.

The Simple Dollar have some excellent advice on how to organise your filing cabinet. This is well worth reading.

After you’ve organised your filing cabinet, Seeking Alpha have some advice for you on which financial documents you should keep and which documents you should discard.

American readers may be interested to know that it is possible to ‘check’ one’s FICO score for free online using this service.

Wisebread have a great post describing their experience getting the cable provider Comcast to reduce their rates. After receiving their bill from the provider, Wisebread decided to act. The story is entertaining but, more importantly, it provides an important lesson for all of us: it often pays to ask..

So on behalf of Wisebread (and for my own selfish reasons) I called Comcast. I said right out I wanted to disconnect my service, and was not interested in any offers to make me change my mind. Of course, that’s all I was interested in. I don’t want to go through the hassle of returning equipment, stopping service, and setting up a new account with a new provider. That’s way too much work. I just want more for less.

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The question of whether it is better to buy or rent is often an easy one for Muslims as, depending on where one lives, halal finance options may not always be available. Often, home ownership is seen as more or less given: the Great Australian, American, or Calathumpian Dream.

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British television program The Real Deal shows how easy it is for waiters to steal your credit/charge card details using a hidden card skimmer.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems can be annoying at times with their maze of options (”Press 1 for accounts, press 2 for customer service, press 3 for support, press 4 for sales..”) and time spent waiting for someone to answer. Ivrhacks is a useful user-maintained database of shortcuts for many Australian, American, Canadian and British companies that lets you exit the maze as quickly as possible in order to reach a real human. For example, here are shortcuts for American Express in Australia, USA, and the United Kingdom.

UC Berkeley’s School of Information have published an interesting study of immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States. Some of their findings include:

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