I was just thinking last week, “I wish there was a way to put up the hijri date on my blog.”

Thanks for visiting my blog, also. Plus I love the look of yours.

No disrespect but I don’t think your comment above has even the slightest to do with Usayd’s new plugin! I don’t understand why you felt compelled to write a review of current software out there and then paste actual output from them on this post.

Usayd, great plugin, I’m going to try it out very soon!

(I mean not to overwhelm with a partly tangential comment. I had begun this, upon an intention for to not make only a short comment. The text of this, at the end, is not short.)

The Hijri-date calculating code that you mention, perhaps it would have been attendant after the work of Dr. Waleed A. Muhana. Specifically, there is the IslamicTimer suite. It works on UNIX-style and DOS-supporting systems, both. (NB: If XP does not support DOS, there is DOSBox). I did not want to leave out a mention about this, though I had spent more time, here, about a similar suite.

Additionally, there is the ITL project being managed at/of ArabEyes. Incorporated in the results of the project are the LibITL library and the ITools suite.

(Their work appears to be more recently-initiated than that made of Dr. Muhana, or I was not aware of the ArabEyes project, some years ago)

Like as with the IslamicTimer suite, the ITools suite includes commands for qiblah calculation and prayer-time reminders, a command for hijri/gregorian date conversion, and a command for the printing of hijri calendards.

The LibITL library is a basis for the ITools suite, and for the KPrayertmes prayer-time reminder application (available for systems supporting KDE — e.g. Linux and OS-X)

LibITL and the ITools suite are built according to standardized POSIX-and-LibC conventions — inasmuch as I might presume to summarize this. As such, it will not compile or run, natively, on Microsoft systems. Yet, if it would be of interest, there should be a way to make it run pseudo-natively on windows.

Inshaa Allah , an interested party would be met with a kind response on the project mailing-lists — e.g. developer list — if one would want to ask as for whether ITools would work with Cygwin, thereby pseudo-natively working in MS windows space. (It may be not necessary, but inshaa Allah , it could be asked)

It could be a long way around to the same effect that the IslamicTimer suite supports, but if ITools would be ported to Cygwin and released in a Cygwin package, then ITools would be available as a Windows-native Hirji date converter (and I don’t know how things work with the ITools prayer-time reminder. I’ve come to use wmsolat).

Cygwin, itself, is not a very small thing to install, but the installation is not difficult.

Example output from the ical application, from the ITools suite:

Ramadan 1426 (A.H)
S Ah I T Ar K J
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 [24] 25
26 27 28 29 30

and from idate:

Date Format (dd/mm/yyyy):
+ Input : 27/10/2005 - Thursday(Thu) - October(Oct)
—————————–
+ Output : 24/ 9/1426 A.H - Khamees(Kha) - Ramadan(Ram)

(*) Event on this Day : Quran Revealed - day #4

(The commands accept gregorian and hijri dates, for input, defaulting to the current date.)

There’s as much as I can think to summarize — in relation here, and for community interest — about ITools.

I consider that the ArabEyes team — the developers of Itools and furthermore — theirs is another developer team to not neglect. Their Arabic translation projects and their distinct software projects appear as being of clear importance, in regards to free/open source software, the Arabic language, and — not lastly — matters attendant upon Islam, such that may be addressed with software technology.

I do not mean to leave out a mention of their project for a digital Qur’an reader.

(As it is, they have pulled the tasfir/translations out from the releases, witholding the texts of such for verification. The app, there, seems to still be available with the Arabic-language text that is the text of the blessed Qur’an.)

(I have not taken time to compile and install it. It would be distinctly time-consuming, and I have not yet learned the Arabic language. )

Final thought, in explanation of some non-involvement: The ArabEyes project uses C and C++. I am not unaware of how C is, but I use Common Lisp. Furthermore, I am far from having an acceptable GUI system to work with. What I have does not, either, support input or display of non-roman-ish text or speech output in lieu of “GUI” components. Inshaa Allah , we will meet upon a comfortable way and would coordinate efforts, time from now.