It was reported last week that there had been a substantial drop in the level of spam on the net since last August and a precipitous drop since Christmas, which a Symantec analyst put down to a drop in output from three major “botnets” (networks of compromised computers, which may include your Windows home computer). Graham Cluley of Sophos suggests that Spamit, the major supplier of spam to one of the botnets, which used to be responsible for a lot of the pharmaceutical spam, has shut down. The BBC has a graph (above, source here) showing a persistent downward trend since August, with two sharp dips in September and another in November, and another sharp drop in December which has so far not “recovered”.

This may well be true of email spam, although I don’t see much of it anyway on my web host’s email; perhaps it’s because it gets caught upstream (I get plenty on Yahoo and Hotmail). It definitely isn’t true of comment spam on this blog. In the last few weeks I have seen an explosion of it, with as much spam in an hour as I used to have to clear out in the morning. What this often means is that it takes too long to go through them and find the genuine comments, which is what I was able to do when I only got 60 or 80 spams a night — now, I get 200 or more a lot of the time, and more during the day which I could clear out every few hours. These days, I look at a couple of pages of it, and then click “empty spam” and just have to hope I haven’t deleted any real comments.

I can now see the attraction of using a hosted blogging service like LiveJournal or Blogger; I find their comment systems somewhat irritating — they don’t always allow you to sign with your name and website as you can here or on wordpress.com, and the OpenID authentication does not always work properly (when I signed with my TypeKey ID, it would be displayed using a string of letters and numbers rather than my actual username). However, if you can sign with a website that the site does not recognise (i.e. one of their own), you can sign with a spam site. Of course, I will not be moving my blog over to one of them, having asked readers for help with the hosting bills, but if it weren’t for Akismet, I’d not have the open comments system on here that I have; I simply could not afford the time to wade through it all.

I had been interested in disability issues since mid-2009, and had long had friends with one disability or another, but this heightened when I read the story of Lynn Gilderdale in January, after her mother was tried for assisting her suicide. I have told the story many times here and it was widely reported in the British media. For reasons I still can’t quite explain, it had a huge emotional impact on me (part of the story is here) and I remember sitting in Costa and being reminded of her, lying there in pain all those years, every time I was about to swallow any of my coffee. I developed an intense interest in ME and it basically became my cause, and I made a few new friends through it including one quite special one, and it provided a whole host of new blogging material.

As those friends came, another lot went, including someone I had been friends with (online and through IM and Skype conversations) since 2003. This had been building up for some time, in large part due to the escalating Jordan controversy of the previous year and because of the antics of one particular former mutual friend. She cut off contact with me once because of accusations others made about me, and did so again after accusing me of allowing others to question her imaan (faith) when I posted a robust defence of polygamy in Islam. I had expected the post to be controversial, but this was over something I did not even know had happened. I can’t completely protect people who comment from being offended unless there is an obvious insult. With that, my last connection to the Muslim blogging community I’d been part of from 2004 to 2008 was severed.

QTM moved on in its usual fits and starts. I made two releases in the second half of the year. Sadly, I find that Qt’s future is uncertain, as Nokia (the company that now owns it) seems to have backed the wrong horse in the mobile phone market. Trolltech (which originally developed it) had its own Linux mobile and PDA platform called Qtopia, but the smartphone market now seems to be divided between the iPhone and Android, with Symbian (the main mobile target for Qt) being squeezed out. On top of this, KDE on the Linux desktop has lost a lot of ground and I had a letter printed in Linux Format in November in which I said I thought it was dead. Qt is too brilliant to just die, it’s really a joy to program with and it runs fast. Perhaps I should broaden my skills base in that area.

Then in June, my sister had a baby girl. I’m now an uncle, and some of you who know me on Facebook or Twitter have seen the odd picture of her and know what she’s called (which I’m not telling the whole world). Her pregnancy was particularly difficult and there was a month-long series of false starts, but when she did come, it was pretty quick. She also got married in August (to the dad, you’ll be pleased to know) and so I now have a brother-in-law (previously it was just me and my sis).

Two other good things happened this past year. The first was getting to the doctor to get my Asperger’s referral, after holding it off for ages. The second was that some work finally came my way last month — I’m not sure if it’s just a bit of pre-Christmas stuff, but nothing like it happened in 2009 and there were only a few days in December 2008 (and I got the flu and had to tail off). It was sorely needed because I ran into trouble with the benefits people, and it meant doing a lot of the country driving I used to enjoy doing a lot when I was driving. I do hope I can find something a bit more meaningful fairly soon, as well as a bit more secure than agency driving.

Anyway I know it’s a bit late, but it’s near the end of the New Year holiday in the UK (as New Year’s Day was a Saturday, we get an extra bank holiday on the following Monday), so I thought if I didn’t post this now I never would. I never exactly look forward to the new year, but for once I’ve got hopes that this coming year will be different (in a good way) from the old one. I hope that’s the same for my readers.

WordPress is more of a straight-out-of-the-box blogging platform, although it can easily be used for other purposes. Drupal is a website toolkit and pretty much anything you do with it will require some customisation and much use of the administration tools. You’ll at least want to change the default theme, you’ll need to decide how to categorise your postings as you can set up multiple content types and add different sets of categories to each, you’ll need to decide which modules to actually switch on … it takes work, and using a flexible content management system (CMS) does, by nature.

To be sure, WordPress has added some features in recent versions which make installing and upgrading themes and plugins much easier than it ever has been in Drupal. You can do it all from the admin interface in WordPress — install plugins and themes, upgrade them, upgrade the whole system. Upgrading Drupal to a new major version is a much bigger undertaking as you have to make sure all the modules you are currently using have equivalents in the new one, and you have to upgrade each module manually, shutting down your whole site for a while as you put each new piece in place. Drupal could well include some of these features in the upcoming Drupal 7 release, but a big upgrade of the whole system is always going to be a bigger undertaking than in WordPress. Meanwhile, one feature I’d like WordPress to borrow from Drupal is the ability to configure widgets (blocks, as Drupal calls them) per theme, so that you can experiment with a theme and, if you don’t like it, go back to the old one and find your widgets where they were before. In WordPress, each theme has its own set of “widget areas”, and if you switch to a theme with different names for its sidebars, it loses all your arrangements.

Besides, setting up a professional-looking and distinctive WordPress site is not all that easy either. I’m fairly good at writing content and using the software to run my website, but the design is just not my forte and never has been, so I need either an easily-configurable basic theme, or a theme that suits me out of the package, and while I’m fairly satisfied with the theme I’m using now, I’m aware that it’s not unique to my site and I do know of someone who chose the exact same theme I have. But it’s not every other WordPress site that has it. There are a handful of themes that I would estimate are used on at least half of WordPress sites, and they aren’t much better looking than the standard themes on Drupal.

So, Drupal is never going to be WordPress and while there are features each could borrow from each other to make Drupal easier to use and WordPress more versatile, there is a place for both because they are different types of CMS. For a site showcasing a piece of software, in which you need two or more different types of content (a blog for announcements, a changelog, usage documentation), Drupal can’t be beat. For a ready-to-roll blogging platform, choose WordPress.

However, I am always most keen to see my referrer lists, to see who’s linking to my site, and lately I’ve noticed that these statistics are being filled up with sites which obviously have nothing to do with mine and had no reason to link to it. The past few months I’ve noticed that most of the sites which appear in my referrer lists (i.e. the lists of where people had supposedly found the link to my site and clicked it) are the same kind of sites which commonly appear in email spam, i.e. a lot of sites advertising stuff, and particularly dodgy and sleazy stuff.

I hope the people behind Awstats (the stats program my web host uses) find a way of distinguishing fake referrals from real ones, because my lists are becoming next to useless. My lists are private, but a lot of people make their stats public and I guess that’s the problem: it’s a way for these sites to get free advertising, up their Google ratings and so on. Surely those who develop public stats display software should employ spam filtering or Nofollow, so that there is no motivation to post false referrals.

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 WordPress.TV site but so far, it’s not appeared.

Anyone who was blogging in 2004 will remember Movable Type, which was the major, and the most stable, self-hosted blogging platform then. MT wasn’t then open-source (it is now), and Six Apart caused a lot of controversy by choosing to charge for it. Of course, not everyone paid, but certainly those who made money out of their blogs, beyond donation boxes and Google ads and the like, had to. This caused a lot of consternation because a lot of people out there think that they should get all software for free.

But that wasn’t what sank MT as far as personal blogging was concerned. What did that was spam. In late 2004 and early 2005, if you had an MT blog you couldn’t have open comments, because you would get flooded with spam. Many of us took to disguising the scripts used for comments and Trackback, but on one occasion, my then web host (the British-based Fasthosts) shut down my site because a run on my Trackback script caused all the sites hosted on the same server to stop working. (Their reaction, by the way, shows that they had no understanding, or at least didn’t care, about blogging and the specific issues bloggers had to deal with.)

WordPress v1.5, released in February 2005, introduced the two-level word-based comment filtering, so that you could filter out common words used in spam. I switched almost as soon as it came out, and it cut my spam dramatically. Although that method is no longer as effective as it once was, and it had its limitations (such as blocking anything containing a given string, even an innocent word, e.g. “cialis” within “specialist”), I was then able to recommend it to other bloggers in my community who had been reluctant to transition from Blogger to MT because of spam. It introduced other revolutionary features, such as “pages”, or articles that could be displayed outside the chronology of the blog, as with the “About” and “Policies” pages that are so common now.

WordPress installed (and still does) in five minutes; it remains a very quick and easy way to set up and maintain a self-hosted blog. One thing it didn’t have then, however, was the ability to administer more than one blog or site from the same admin screen, which Movable Type always had. That didn’t come in until the recently-released WordPress 3.0, and then you have to enable it manually. This is eventually why I took my blog back to MT when version 3.2 came out, which rectified a lot of the spam troubles. I eventually returned to WordPress a little over a year ago when I realised that MT wasn’t really for small-time bloggers like me anymore; it was firmly aimed at corporate customers. A most annoying feature was the lack of blogroll management; there had been a plugin that worked with version 3.2 and 3.3, but it was left behind by MT 4. It is, of course, part of WordPress as standard.

I upgraded to version 3.0 the day it came out, and I’m happy to report that my theme and plugins worked just fine (the only issue was the Broken Link Checker, which threw a database error, but all that needed to be done was deactivate it and then reactivate it again). The new features aren’t staggering for the ordinary user; there is now support for “taxonomy” (custom-designed categorisation) and user-defined post types similar to what is found in Drupal, but you need extra plugins ([1], [2]) to make these work from the admin screen. They also have multi-site administration as a result of merging the WordPress MU software (used to run WordPress.com) into WordPress itself; you can, however, continue to just use WP as you did before if you only need one blog (it might, actually, be easier to just install WordPress as many times as you need if you have more than one). The new features most readily available are custom menus and a new theme called Twenty Ten (there are actually many blogs currently using this or a very similar theme, like this one). So go ahead and upgrade if you’re wondering, but the new features won’t be all that exciting for most bloggers.

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 “well, you could just take off the hijab and you’d get your privilege back”. Privilege is the unearned advantages one gets by being part of a dominant group — being white and/or male, for example — and while I don’t dispute that it exists, I’ve also noticed that it’s often used as a convenient means of dismissing people’s opinions. Sometimes, one sees an invocation of “privilege” which is plain silly. This post at Womanist Musings is one such.

James Bain is a 54-year-old man from Florida who was recently released from prison after serving 35 years in jail for a burglary and male rape he didn’t commit; DNA testing was used (having been refused on multiple occasions by the courts) and proved that he was “just not connected to this particular incident” according to a Florida state attorney. A law passed in Florida last year entitles those wrongfully convicted to $50,000 for every year they spend behind bars, which in Bain’s case adds up to $1.75m. Bain wants to go home and look after his 77-year-old mother, who is in poor health and has been in hospital several times over the last few times. Getting a girlfriend is not on the agenda for now, because Bain fears that a woman might only be after his money:

He said it’s the money that’s keeping him on his guard — and is one reason why he doesn’t yet have a girlfriend.

“I just don’t want no woman to want me for my money, to be honest with you,” he said. “… You don’t know what they have planned.”

I’d say this attitude is quite natural for someone who has just come into a substantial sum of money that is beyond their experience or that of someone of their social class. I recall Mukhtaran Mai, the victim of a public gang rape in Pakistan, saying similar things about men who had proposed marriage to her after she received compensation. But Renee, the author of Womanist Musings, doesn’t see things this way:

His suggestion plays into the meme that women are gold diggers who are constantly out to take money from men. This construction of course never considers the millions of hours of free labour that the average woman will supply patriarchy throughout her lifetime. In the interactions between men and women, it is men who will overwhelmingly profit.

It is tempting to give Bain a pass because he has not witnessed first hand the struggles of women’s groups to attack sexism; however, this does not acknowledge that in the time before he was imprisoned, he was more than willing to adopt the male privilege that patriarchy handed to him on a silver platter.

Sexism is connected to race because Black women continue to have to deal with it on a daily basis. Many Black men are convinced that we should openly embrace their issues while ignoring the ways in which the Black male patriarchy has brought significant harm to Black girls and women.

Bain is fine with women as long as he can maintain control of the relationship. He currently resides with his mother and has expressed a desire to take care of her, thus fulfilling the male provider role. It is quite normal to want to take care of an aging parent, but when it falls into typical understandings of how we perceive gender, it is indeed problematic.

He was only 19 when he was sentenced (which meant he could have been in jail for several months before). To suggest that someone “was more than willing to adopt the male privilege that patriarchy handed to him on a silver platter” requires that you know anything about his life story or his family circumstances before that, and none of that is in the reports. This is fairly typical of those who harp on “privilege”: they think they are entitled to make assumptions about the supposedly privileged person. (Someone who got wrongly imprisoned in the USA is likely to have been to poor to afford a lawyer he could pay to stay awake while purporting to represent him, for example.) There is no mention that he had a wife or a girlfriend, and the idea of a male “shepherd” as the head of the household is what patriarchy means, after all. Besides, who’s talking about black women? He mentioned women, so all the talk about how he sees black women as a threat (as opposed to just being suspicious of women generally after not having met one in 35 years) is irrelevant.

Someone intending to go and look after an ailing elderly mother is unlikely to be seeking a relationship in which he or she is powerful, in any case. People usually respect the authority of their parents, after all. He does have control over his own money and — at least in our society — has the ability to leave the relationship, particularly in Bain’s situation where he has money. In any case, his mother is not his only family member and he will probably not be her sole carer, but a participant in her care — he will be rejoining the household he had to leave when sent to prison. He is a free man, and doubtless after spending 35 years in prison, he wants to stay that way for the foreseeable future rather than letting himself get tied down with responsibilities for a wife and children, regardless of what authority and privilege he may acquire by doing that.

In my post on white privilege last year, I mentioned male privilege and how, for black men in many places, whatever power they have is outweighed by disadvantages compared to black women — the fact that they can’t go to the next district without fear of running into the local “boys” who might attack them (this a known problem in some districts in London), the fact that they face pressure to join gangs (ditto), and the greater likelihood of police harassment and of ending up in prison. It’s a bit distasteful for a woman, of whatever race, to lecture a man who has experienced this kind of oppression to talk of his “privilege”.

Perhaps my horror of prisons is unusual, but I cannot think of anything worse in this life than being trapped in a building full of criminals (including some of the staff) when I’m innocent, being locked in a room at night (and much of the day) with two or more other men, having to relieve myself in front of them, and in the same room in which I eat, not being able to see my family more than once every few weeks, and possibly without being able to touch them, and subject to the whims of the staff — lockdowns, cell raids, “practice pack-ups” and other petty humiliations — and to those of other prisoners, up to and including rape. I had a taste of some of this at boarding school as a teenager (no, not the rape bit) and would sooner find myself paralysed than go through anything like it ever again. Nobody, not even someone with a painful disability (such as Renee’s fibromyalgia) who lives with their family and sleeps in their own bed and eats home-cooked food (or even if they’re tube-fed as long as nobody’s spitting or putting broken glass in their feed, as has been known to happen with prison food), assuming he or she is not being abused there, has any right to talk of a man with a 35-year jail term recently behind him being privileged.

However, there are quite a few flaws in this report. Is this meant to report on self-identifying Islamic or Muslim blogs generally, or just those based in the UK or which comment heavily on British politics? If the former, the top 20 should surely have included what were still highly influential blogs then: Sunni Sister, Izzy Mo’s blog, Writeous Sister Speaks, Mere Muslim and Umar Lee’s blog. The first four have since been removed and the last has become inactive as of this month, but they would certainly have been more influential than mine in April 2008, although certainly not on UK-specific issues as they were all American blogs. Ali Eteraz has stopped blogging since then in favour of publishing articles elsewhere and writing books. How exactly is research carried out nearly two years ago still relevant, anyway?

And what is their definition of “pro-Islamic”, anyway? One of the blogs in the top five, the Angry Arab News Service, is run by a self-proclaimed atheist while another, Islam in Europe, is obviously not run by a Muslim and is not exactly “pro-Islamic” in my observation either.

It was noted that much of the sources used in the British blogs was sourced from the mainstream media, not specifically Islamic sources such as Press TV or Al-Jazeera, even the English branch. Specifically, much of the material came from the Guardian, the BBC and the Times. Personally, I do not use the Times that much; I used to use the Telegraph’s website quite a lot, but these days the traditionally Tory media are much more prone to xenophobia and Islamophobia than they used to be. I’ve read the Guardian since I was at school. I’ve read it long enough to trust it to some degree and just because some of its writers might not have the same views as me on Islam or other aspects of politics, it doesn’t mean I can’t gauge what’s useful from it and what’s not. It has a wider range of views in its opinion columns than any of the other “quality” papers, including the Independent where the right-wingers are balanced only by Johann Hari and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I don’t have time to read several media outlets per day; I tend to rely on the BBC for news and the Guardian for deeper investigation and comment.

So, this is not a very useful piece of research. Its main flaw is that it’s out of date, and blogs are usually individual efforts which come and go as the author sees fit. The most successful are the group blogs such as Muslim Matters, but that site (which has commented on British political and community matters on a number of occasions) isn’t mentioned on the report. While it’s nice to get recognition and to get my blog mentioned in the Guardian, the ranking really doesn’t mean anything given the lack of valid and current data to back it up.

I posted my views on the issues he raised in a comment on that entry, but I do wish to make the point that the traditionalist blogs, including at least one of those he names which have shut down, always challenged the extreme modernists, notably the Muslim WakeUp site, covered the schisms in the “Progressive Muslims” movement which eventually burned itself out, and drew attention to the RAND report and its clear attempt to drive divisions in the community by supporting one section against another. The blogs he talks about may well exist, but I’ve managed to avoid them all the time I’ve been part of the Muslim blog scene.

As for why several of the older blogs closed down, I do believe that the Jordan issue contributed substantially. Once Umm Zaid was gone, those close to her felt less need to continue. Certain people knew of problems there which they chose to keep silent about; the way it came out in early 2009, with foully-worded comments on Umar’s blog and on Salafi Burnout (which the WordPress admins rightly closed down as it was full of unbridled libel against many individuals; my comment here), caused a lot of hurt and acrimony. Another issue may have been that the ending of the Bush era made the sense of solidarity it brought about seem less necessary, and thus some Muslims became less tolerant of each other. One formerly well-respected blogger became antagonistic to me and more recently to several others over what still seem like very petty issues.

Am I going to shut my blog down? Certainly not. Blogging is still relevant in a British context, given that we have Europe on our doorstep, large sections of which are becoming increasingly hostile to their own Muslim populations and where an anti-Muslim rabble-rouser stands a chance of becoming the prime minister of one of our closest neighbours, and there is pressure within this country to take a similar road. We have newspapers who run front-page attacks on Muslim women, usually for their dress; we have TV channels which send spies into mosques and then broadcast what they find; we have even had physical attacks on Muslims, including an attack which left an imam in London completely blind, and on Muslim properties and mosques; and we still have Muslims willing to be played off against others and to attack whole other groups of Muslims in the press by calling them terrorist sympathisers and the suchlike. American Muslim readers should remember that the first successful terrorist attack happened here nearly four years after 9/11, and we are still dealing with the consequences of it.

All this needs to be fought and the internet — individual and group blogs, forums, mailing lists and so on — is a good way of co-ordinating resistance as well as refuting the nonsense which appears regularly about us in the media. There are other issues this blog covers, such as the ongoing issue of mentally impaired people being harassed in the street and sometimes tortured to death by groups of their so-called friends, and the fact that some people think a serious disease which can paralyse and mute a 14-year-old girl and take someone out of circulation for twenty years or more is some kind of joke, not to mention the personal interests that this blog helps support. This is why I have no intention of stopping blogging any time soon.

When you select a permalink pattern from the list of options (default, day and name etc.) and then select “Save changes”, it will tell you that you need to rewrite your .htaccess file. This file tells your web server software (likely Apache) what to do when someone tries to read a file or location that doesn’t exist, such as the fake file paths commonly used in permalinks. When you select the permalink pattern, it will change the contents of the line-edit box next to “Custom structure”. Insert “/index.php” (without the quotes) in front, check the box to the left of “Custom structure” and select “Save changes”. There is no need to alter your .htaccess then.

Why? Because index.php is a real file, and as that exists, the rest of the URL will be passed to it as a query. This saves fiddling around with trying to upload a hidden file which might not show up in your FTP client either on your system or on the web host. It works just as well (maybe even faster) even though it might look a little less clean. The “mt.php” in all my permalinks dates from a time when I was using Movable Type and had a host which wouldn’t let me edit my .htaccess file (for any MT users, mt.php was a renamed mtview.php); now I need it there just to make sure any link to my entries still works.

I do use Twitter, but mainly to announce blog posts over Facebook and to draw attention to interesting websites and videos. Even if I had the equipment, I couldn’t be bothered to Tweet my every thought. Then again, as the Guardian reported today, it was instrumental in opening up the debate on the Trafigura injunctions a couple of weeks ago, so it has its place.