This Blog is Against Cyber Censorship

March 12th, 2010 Lebanon, Technology, Uncategorized, arab, blogging, campaign, internetTags: censorship, cyber, internet, online

New RTL-This Tutorial

November 30th, 2009 blogging, greetings, internet, rtl-this, webdevTags: feast, greetings, internet, news, rtl, rtl-this, tutorial

So I managed to write a simple tutorial that consists of three parts about how to RTL a simple webpage:

1. RTLing a Hello World WebPage: http://rtl-this.com/tutorial/rtling-hello-world-webpage
2. Getting to Know the HTML/CSS: http://rtl-this.com/tutorial/rtling-hello-world-webpage-getting-know-htmlcss
3. RTLing: http://rtl-this.com/tutorial/rtling-hello-world-webpage-rtling

I hope it’s useful to someone

I received links and feedback from several readers about the RTL of the Web. I didn’t expect to get that help that was very kind, sweet and simply amazing. Thank you so much I’ll publish them all soon.

One more thing: if you’re a web designer and have the time and will to design a (free) blog template so it can be flipped in a tutorial and be available to be downloaded let me know so we can work work on something together.

وعيد أضحى مبارك

(ماتؤاخذوني مأخرة شوي)

RTL This..finally!

October 28th, 2009 Technology, Uncategorized, internet, programming, rtl-this, webdevTags: css, drupal, html, internet, rtl, rtl-this, web design, web development

I finally managed to do it There is an actual blog called RTL This now and guess what..I used Drupal this time

I added some explanation posts(okay just 1 or 2 ) and the tutorials are coming soon.

Let me know what you think…I really hope someone would find it useful..

RTL This

October 5th, 2009 Uncategorized, arab, blogging, internet, language, rtl-thisTags: arab, blogs, rtl, rtl-this, tempates, themes

It has always bothered me the very limited collection of RTL(right-to-left) blog templates/themes..whether it’s for Blogger, Wordpress or Drupal or any other Blogging platform or CMS. Web Designers and Developers might not find a problem since they can flip it themselves in couple of hours depending on the design itself.

The other part of Arab Bloggers (the majority) do not have the enough skills to do such tasks. So we end up with:

1. A very limited number of RTL themes that we see everywhere (especially Blogger)
2. And the many many LTR (left-to-right) themes that simply don’t look nice with the Arabic content (although usually they’re very beautifull themes)

The ideal solution I want? Is to convince all of the web designers and developers of the world to include an RTL version of their themes! We have to wait for that a really long time..

So what can we do? communicate! We can share our ideas and skills to help enriching this poor space of the web. There are really beautifull themes out there and they will look even more beautifull if they fit well with our Arabic content.

I will start hopefully before the end of this year to share my own tips and tricks on how to deal with the RTL side of the web. I’m not a guru, and I’m not a pro, but I want to share what I know and learn what you know. I have thought of naming this learning experience “RTL This”. What do you think? I’d love to know your opinion..

Gmail Day Dreams…

February 24th, 2009 google, internet, society

…or more likely Nightmares.
I didn’t care much when I knew about the Gmail outage. I was at work with hundreds of stuff to do…

10 minutes later, I started to freak out, I thought about every web-application, account, subscription and contacts I use..Most of them (if not All) depend on my Gmail account. I even use Gmail for online file storage :$. I would literally die ‘virtually’ without it.*

Although the idea of Google owning us all (what I concluded from the freakig out) may annoy some, I still like Google. At least it united the world for a couple of hours for a good cause: Communication. That’s what we all humans are here for **…right?

* (I know only the Web Interface was down and it wasn’t that bad. I tend to dramatize things).
**(And we suck at it).

Geocities 1996

February 11th, 2009 funny, internet, webdev

If you’re into web design, then you definitely heard about ‘CSS Zen Garden‘.According to the Zen Garden it’s:

A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.

In short it’s a place where web designers can show off their skills and designs. You take the plain HTML markup they give you, work on a design, style the HTML you took with CSS without changing a single bit in the HTML. It’s pretty challenging and that’s why you see wonderful submissions from around the world…

My favorite was the “Retro Theatre” theme. Until I saw the “Geocities 1996” one. Watch out before viewing it…It can hurt your eyes The author said he was nostalgic when he decided to create this beautifull mess, I mean design . He’s brilliant!

I hope this motivates you to submit your own Zen Garden CSS Design.

Help :D

September 8th, 2008 blogging, internet

Is it a good idea aslan to think of doing this?!

Thanks alot..

IE allergic to acid

July 31st, 2008 Technology, internet

Another attempt to make the IE user -hopefully not for long- switch to Firefox (version 3 is amazing!). So, let’s not talk about long lists of differences and features. We have a test, called the acid test..Click here to see what it should look like when it loads(the reference). And click here to test your browser.

Ofcourse, Firefox3 passes the test beautifully (download it from here). IE6 and IE7 totally fail…ofcourse!! The Microsoft developpers said that their baby IE8 passed the acid2 test but later..they said that it didn’t pass and they even wrote why…..no comment.

This may not seem a big deal to the users (it’s huge to web developpers). I mean it’s just a test after all and not the end of the world. But again, would you use a browser that messes up that cute smiley face the way IE does??

Help Firefox!! Download it Today!!

June 17th, 2008 internet

Twitter, Watwet and Jaiku

April 21st, 2008 blogging, internet

It’s true that twitter was the first who introduces the concept of mini blogging and the guys there were pretty good at the beginning, adding new features all the time according to the users’ activities and so on. But lately, they’ve been (to me) a complete failure after they changed their international number. And for some reason it stopped working in Lebanon and some other countries including Egypt as I received complaints from fellow twitterers…Dear Egyptian twitterers, don’t bother to contact them because it’s useless, their reply (if any) will be a list of the supported networks (which will include yours ofcourse) and that’s it. I wish I have the email they sent me but I deleted it long time ago..

So what are the alternatives?!?! Quitting mini blogging isn’t an option ofcourse, once you get used to it you can’t quit it. Believe me I tried!!
What else?!

1. There’s watwet, a new member to the toot and ikbis families (are there others?). It’s not bad but it doesn’t offer anything new and
a. The mobile service only supports Zain (in Jordan) numbers. I hope it’s just for now and that they’ll add more in the future. But even if they did, I doubt I’ll use it (although I created an account there).

b. Why? look at the public timeline..It reminds me of Melody Tunes SMS bar….

c. They have this upload photos section, via the web or MMS. It’s a nice idea but I don’t need it that much in mini blogging. It would be much better if I can post photos I uploaded on ikbis of flickr instead of uploading them in watwet all over again…Bloggers don’t need an extra place to upload photos!!

d. Oh..And I don’t remember reading somewhere about IM-watweting or adding some badges to a blog or something (you can use your feed for now if you want to).

So as a start, watwet isn’t bad but not good enough..

2. There’s Jaiku..and it’s now the Google’s twitter..I have to say I was impressed!!
a. Mobile-Jaikuing works!!!!!

b. They have this “add feeds” option, you can add any feed (rss or atom) to your account and your jaiku timeline will be updated with anything new on the feeds. I loved this one!! very much! I added my twitter feed..LOL

c. IM-Jaikuing works too, and the supported services are Google Talk, LiveJournal, and Jabber. AIM, Yahoo, and MSN are supported too via IMfied. It’s pretty annoying though that they add too much info in your IM-Jaiku-updates, such as the link of the updated and the original message (if it’s a reply) or a link of the posted item (if it’s a feed). But it’s fine I’ll get used to it I guess..

d. When you add a contact, you can choose what you get from him/her not everything. For example, I can choose to only receive Jaiku and flickr updates from a contact and exclude his/her delicious tags. I love this one too

UPDATE, I forgot this:
e. Channels, it’s new…you create your own channels about anything, and get your friends to join them. This concept of categorizing your updates is amazing!!!

I don’t know if there are any other alternatives. If you happen to know please tell me but I guess I’ll stick to Jaiku for now, obviously it’s is my winner!!! UPDATE:Now the only problem with Jaiku is that it’s not Twitter. The community in twitter is large and you can find almost anything there. Jaiku still doesn’t have that, I hope by time they’ll get there…and I hope that by time, they’ll get rid of the “twitter-like” in their description on the web..

And what’s with the weird names?!?! Is it a must for mini blogging services to have a funny name??

One more thing, Good morning It’s a nice day today, I feel it!! Wish you a great day as well!!