Ask a loaded question …
Over the years, a frustrating phenomenon for anyone writing about the oppression of Palestinians and the upsurge in hostility to Muslims in the West following 9/11 was an established race relations industry that was...
Category: Blogs
On the takeover of Twitter
So, this past week the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the CEO of the Tesla car company, finally went through. Musk has announced that he plans to reform the rules of Twitter to...
Wot no spam?
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...
Review of my 2010
This is, as far as I remember, the first time I’ve ever posted a review of a year to my blog, and that’s probably been because no old year has been as different from...
WordPress v Drupal
The other day I saw a post on my WordPress admin screen entitled WordPress and Drupal: Convergence? which presented a slideshow of why [Wordpress](http://wordpress.org) was supposedly going to overtake [Drupal](http://drupal.org/). I use WordPress for...
Web stats spam
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...
WordPress 3.0, and why WordPress stole MT’s thunder
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...
What part of this is a privilege?
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,...
IJB fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog, says government report
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,...
Why I still blog
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...
WordPress permalink tip
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...
Stephen Fry might quit Twitter
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...
Hey Emel, what have you done to my avatar?
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...
What’s the use of Twitter?
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...
Ungrateful bloggers! (And credit where it’s due)
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...
Don’t tell me what to write
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...
MySpace cuts jobs as it loses out to Facebook
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...
Anonymous netizens should clean up their act
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 frustrations of switching content management systems
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...
Guardian on comment links and spam
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...