It’s been a long time since anyone I know posted a list of the phrases people put into search engines to get to their site. In my case, the most common phrase is simply “indigo jo”, but there are fair amount of searches for things related to Qt (the programming toolkit, not Long Qt Syndrome), […]
Scott Rosenberg: WordPress – A Key Link in Blogging’s Evolutionary Chain « WordPress.tv This is a 55-minute video about the history of blogging and how websites developed into blogs, which I found linked off my WP admin page. It’s quite interesting, but there’s one point I’d disagree with, and I posted a comment on the […]
Continue reading about WordPress 3.0, and why WordPress stole MT’s thunder
Black Women are Perceived as a Threat (from Womanist Musings) I wrote about the relationship of Muslims to “white privilege” here last May as part of a carnival organised by Brooke of Rolling Ruminations, and followed it up with a post about how complaints about discrimination by convert Muslims are sometimes met with responses like […]
Last night I got word that my blog had been named in a British government report as the fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog. The report, published by the Home Office as a PDF file, is based on research carried out by David Stephens of Nottingham University in early 2008. The report claims that the blogging […]
Continue reading about IJB fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog, says government report
Last week, Umar Lee posted his parting message to the Muslim blogging community, after his blog had been offline for some weeks. His reasoning was twofold: one is that all the best blogs (Sunni Sister, Izzy Mo, Tariq Nelson, Amir of Mujahideen Ryder etc) have been closed down or become inactive and the medium and […]
For anyone setting up a new self-hosted WordPress blog (not on wordpress.com or any similar hosting service), here’s a tip on getting your permalinks set up and getting rid of the queries in the links. When you select a permalink pattern from the list of options (default, day and name etc.) and then select “Save […]
It’s been reported that, after a bit of a tiff with a couple of his online followers, the comedian Stephen Fry is thinking of giving up on Twitter (more here). This all makes me think, “who cares?” — why would anyone want to keep up a running commentary on everything they do and condense it […]
Back in late 2008, I got contacted by Emel magazine, a British Muslim lifestyle magazine, for a feature on Muslim bloggers. The process of getting the material over there took months, and I dealt with two different sisters as the first one left the magazine, but I finally got word last week that it had […]
Continue reading about Hey Emel, what have you done to my avatar?
Last Wednesday, the Guardian had a feature from “inside Twitter HQ” based on interviews with the founders of the service. The article gave potted histories of the founders, two of whom were formerly involved in Blogger, and mentions the fact that Twitter isn’t making money. The following day, they printed a selection of comments from […]
Is WordPress A Thankless Community? | Weblog Tools Collection Are you using third-party WordPress plugins and themes without having sent the author a thank-you note or donated money? I have to say that, in my financial situation, I am not in a good position to donate money, but the authors have noticed that people don’t […]
Continue reading about Ungrateful bloggers! (And credit where it’s due)
Zaid Shakir recently wrote a reply to some guy who had ridiculed him by calling him a “Muslim rock star” for writing about the death of Michael Jackson when, supposedly, Cynthia McKinney was being held in an Israeli jail. The anonymous complainer got his facts seriously wrong, as the incident involving McKinney happened three days […]
MySpace is forced to slash workforce as social network users flock to Facebook | Technology | The Guardian So, why is MySpace losing out? Has anyone been on any MySpace sites lately? The inconsistent user interface, with the photo albums looking totally different from the profiles, the backgrounds people are able to use, which make […]
Continue reading about MySpace cuts jobs as it loses out to Facebook
Letters: Time for moderation in the blogosphere | Technology | The Guardian A letter from yesterday’s Guardian in response to the scandal over the unmasking of the “Night Jack” police blogger by the Times (the short version is: a policeman who ran an anonymous blog won an award, the Times found out who he was […]
Continue reading about Anonymous netizens should clean up their act
Recently, I have been hearing over Twitter that one of my contacts has been thinking of moving one of his websites off WordPress onto Expression Engine, a proprietary content management system. I have never tried EE, but have tried a number of the more common open source CMS’s including Textpattern, Movable Type, WordPress and Drupal. […]
Continue reading about The frustrations of switching content management systems
Yesterday’s Guardian Technology supplement had an interesting article on comment spam and the use of the “nofollow” feature to discourage it. My own view on this is that the value of “nofollow” is limited nowadays because of better spam filtering; Akismet takes care of the vast majority of mine, to the extent that I only […]
Brooke has finally posted her blog carnival on “White privilege and the Ummah”, with my contribution as well as posts from Safiyya of Shalom 2 Salaam, Safiya of Outlines, Ginny, Fairuza/Sabiwabi, Bin Gregory, Nzingha, Umar Lee and herself. (Ironic that no contributions seem to have come from non-white writers; I’m not sure if that was […]
Continue reading about “White privilege” blog carnival is up
OK, so we’ve all seen that the person formerly known as Umm Zaid has dispensed some of her “pearls of wisdom” - a list of stereotypical blog topics that, supposedly, are all we Muslim bloggers ever write about (toxic waste dumping off Africa and patients’ lives being put at risk by exhausted doctors employed by […]
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