The HirjiDate service was introduced on the 15th January 06, almost 2 months ago now. The first few scripts were just a way of trying to encourage people to use the Hijri Date on their websites and that developed into offering it as a simple include making it even easier for you to do so.

Over the last two months we have been quite closely monitoring the usage of the HijriDate service and we have found that there is some interest in it. A large percentage of this month’s referrals seem to be coming from websites using the HijriDate service (although not enough of them are linking back!).

Progression

Since the first PHP include scripts we have now made the service available as a JavaScript include which is actually proving to be the most popular of the choices. Yesterday a final script was released giving users the option of including the Hijri Date as an image, using a mixture of GD and PHP. Demo:

This image development has a lot of potential but there is a server side problem which is slowing us down a little on development (lack of FreeType library). The Usayd Network has allowed us to test on their servers where we will continue to develop the script until the Younis Server Enterprise servers have FreeType enabled.

Future Aims

An aim that we feel is achievable is one that will hopefully be very appealing to users and this is the introduction of a wizard which gives you options which you can simply select a hit generate for your include. This is already visible on many websites which are offering simple services like this one in order to make it as user friendly as possible. Such a wizard would take a quite bit of hard work and if there is anyone interested in contributing please contact us. At the moment there is no time schedule for this but it has been given a high priority.