Category: Internet

Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell are writing an academic paper on power and politics of blogs. They are soliciting some help. If you’re a journalist, columnist, commentator, producer, or editor for a newspaper, magazine, or television station, we’d appreciate your help. We’d be grateful if you could take two minutes to send an email to… Continue reading Blogging and Politics Paper

Congratulations to Godless Capitalist for the 1000th comment. And it seems I am famous now since I got my first real hateful comment against Muslims (I have had antisemitic comments before but they were more about conspiracy theories than direct hate. UPDATE: Rereading those comments, I was wrong. I have had comments which were extremely… Continue reading Comment Milestones

Mr. Samiulhaq, apparently from Saudi Arabia, reached my weblog by searching for samiulhaq. He got to my post on Activist Islam in Pakistan and commented: send me photo Now, if only he had looked around on my weblog, he would have found a number of photos of me. But alas, he wasn’t that curious! I… Continue reading Weird Comment

Another blog milestone today: I got spam! Somebody left a comment for enlarging certain parts of male anatomy.

Via my referrer logs, I noticed a new blog “A Dervish’s Dua” by Maryam. She has a good post on Muslim feminism as well as a good debunking of Amir Taheri’s claim that hijab is an invention of the 1970s.

I have changed the way my reading list appears. It now shows the cover of the book from Amazon. Thanks to Yaser for his technique of easily doing this. Also, thanks to Anders Jacobsen for how to do this using SSI instead of PHP and to Adam Kalsey for his MTAmazon plugin. POSTSCRIPT: Do you… Continue reading Book List

Some time in the last couple of days, the number of visitors here passed 10,000 since I moved to MT in mid-May. As I had a total of around 10,000 visitors on my old Blogger weblog, it means that I have had 20,000 visitors in 9 months.

This weblog is now #5 on the Google search for Procrastination; #1 for Zack Ajmal; #4 for Zack; and #2 for Ajmal. Also interestingly, I am the #10 search result for “fair and balanced”.

I like Brad Choate’s idea of using Movable Type to write the static parts of one’s website. I have been extremely lazy about developing the rest of my website and even my school web page is a few years old. Also, I don’t have FrontPage or Dreamweaver. (Aside: Should I buy such software? If so,… Continue reading Doing Website with MT

I have installed the disenvowelment plugin by Bryant of Population:One because of an abusive antisemitic visitor. This is as good a time as any to come up with a comment policy. Anything I find rude, abusive, offensive (or just dislike) can be deleted. Abusers will be disenvoweled as a warning. Further abuse will result in… Continue reading Disenvowelment