These
sites all have one
thing in common: they all have something interesting and useful to
offer their visitors.
Currency
Conversion
The Universal
Currency Converter
gives you the market exchange rates of over 180 currencies from around
the world.
Encyclopaedias
Wikipedia calls itself
the
"Free Encyclopedia", and it is free in two senses. First of all, the
information on it can be used without subscriptions or tight copyright
restrictions. In a more
important sense, however, Wikipedia is "free" because anyone can
contribute to it. You can
read and add to
Wikipedia in Arabic
| Bangla
| Belarusian
| Czech
| English
| French
| Latin
| Hindi
| Russian
| Turkish,
and
many other
languages.
Banglapedia
is
Bangladesh's "national encyclopedia", produced by the Asiatic Society
of Bangladesh. It is a very interesting compendium of information on a
vast number of subjects related to the country. While the original
encyclopaedia was published in Bangla, the website contains a good
English translation.
Islam
Whatever place you need
Muslim prayer times for, even the South Pole, chances are that IslamicFinder
has them, mā
shā'
Allāh.
Apart from that, they
give you the qiblah
direction for your
selected place, and also list mosques,
Islamic organisations and Muslim-owned businesses in the area.
To get a free copy of
the
Qur'an which you can read on your computer, visit DivineIslam.
The
Holy Qur'an Viewer software comes with the Arabic text of the Qur'an
and Abdullah Yusuf Ali's interpretation of it into English. You can
also download (again, for free) several other English interpretations,
as well as interpretations into other languages, ranging from Czech to
Malayalam.
Islam
dlia
vsekh (Islam
for Everyone) is the best Islamic site in Russian that I have found, mā
shā'
Allāh.
The site welcomes
"The wandering
philosopher, the curious skeptic, the zealous Muslim, Christian or Jew,
and everyone who gives thought to the subject of why they are alive..."
Contains articles on Islamic beliefs, rituals and philosophy, as well
as news on Muslims around the world.
For
information on when a particular Islamic month starts, especially in
the US and Canada, the best source to consult, in my view, is moonsighting.com,
run by
astronomer Khalid Shaukat.
The Council
on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR) is an organisation dedicated
to
defending the civil rights of Muslims in the US and Canada, and to
improving relations between American and Canadian Muslims and
non-Muslims. On their website, you can receive daily press clippings
containing both good news and bad about Muslims in North America.
Magazines
Saudi Aramco World
is an
exciting and colourful magazine about the Arab and Muslim worlds,
published by the Saudi Aramco oil company. Its writing is at a National
Geographiclevel,
with one difference: just as Yury Senkevich once did
on Soviet TV with his travel show, Saudi
Aramco World manages to cast
all its subjects in a positive
light. You can tell this is a Saudi publication, though: there is no
letters-to-the-editor section, and every once in a while, the magazine
engages in Saudi propaganda. However, it is worth reading for the
breadth of its writing -- it manages to cover subjects ranging from
sarong designs in Indonesia to medieval bath houses in Cairo, and it
leaves you wanting to travel to all these places to find out more. The
website has the full text of the stories.
Maps
The Perry-Castañeda
Library
Map Collection at the University
of Texas at Austin offers a large
number of public-domain maps on its website, both current and
historical.
Measurements
There are some people who are comfortable
with
both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, but most tend to be dumbfounded
by whichever scale they are less familiar with. To the rescue comes the
temperature conversion page of Convert-me.com,
which has to be one of the oldest sites on the Web.
Photography
TrekEarth
is a brilliant site where you can browse through tens of thousands of
photos from the world over, conveniently arranged by continent, country
and theme.
The Official
U.S. Time, which is run by the
National Institute of Standards and
Technology, is a site is primarily intended for American users, but
most
Canadians can use it just as well. It displays the current time in any
of nine North American and Pacific time zones. A really nice feature of
this site is a map that shows which parts of the world are currently in
daylight, and where it is night.
Turkish
Language
One
of the websites that I find immensely helpful in doing my Turkish
homework is Sesli
Sözlük, a
really good and free online English-Turkish and Turkish-English
dictionary.
The other one is Basics
of Turkish Grammar --
indispensible when you need to quickly look up a conjugation.
