Laith Zraikat

"Bitch" here is the verb not the noun.

Blogging is one of the most pivotal phenomena to hit the Internet since its inception. When I think about the Internet since it began, I think: Email, Instant messaging, and Blogging. Once we got over "how cool" Email and IM are, we started addressing the problems associated with them. The same applies to Blogging.

When the Blogging hype began, people were too "at-awe" with the whole thing that simply having a blog meant you were "sophisticated, important, worth-while, or have something important to say". Now that everyone's friend's mother knows what a blog is and some are probably thinking of having one, eyes are turning to the more important question; Why should you have a blog? What should you write in it? What value are you adding with your blog?

It is so easy to create a blog, anyone anywhere can have one. Nobody expressed that  better than "Lore Sjöberg" in his article "The Ultimate Blog Post":

"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it."

He also says:

"Blog" itself is short for "weblog," which is short for "we blog because we weren't very popular in high school and we're trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people."

The most sophisticated blogs are those you read and feel like you have actually expanded your knowledge, or at least gotten some new insight about a topic through someone's "experience"… and I stress on EXPERIENCE.

I like people who write from their educational or professional experience. Even those who simply report news that has already been reported, but add their insight about the matter are actually interesting. I like posts that take one topic and dissect it –given that it is related to their expertise, and not just because they felt like it- even if they do not provide an answer.

What I dislike are bloggers who rant on and on about their problems, their life, how unjust this world is,…etc. Those end up writing "Bitch-Logs" -. For every bitch-post you will find a thousand other posts bitching about the same problem. It is such a waste of time.

To those people I say:

• No one is interested in the fact that you dislike this or love that. We don’t want to hear about your problems. Keep them to yourself and deal with them.
  

• If you want to discuss world hunger, tell us how you can help fight it.
  

• If you want to discuss wife beating, then you should have an experience to share, if not, then shut up, because you have no idea what you're talking about.
  

• If you hate the opposite sex because you were abused by an ex-boyfriend / girlfriend who has likely dumped you because you bitch too much, then you're not helping yourself by further bitching about it.
  

• If you hate the opposite sex just because you can't get one, don’t bitch about it, look in the mirror instead. There are millions of couples out there who are happily married. Just because you can't find one doesn’t mean the problem is "them".
  

• Stop complaining and propose solutions. Unless you have at least an idea for a solution, nobody wants to hear about it.
  

• If you don’t have any experience to share, then talk about your hobbies. If you have none, go get one. It might help you solve some of your problems.
  
  
• Don't give parenting advice is you've never had kids or had to raise kids.
  
  
• Don't give marriage advice if you've never been married.
  
  
• Don't give relatioship advice if you've never had one.
  

I do realize that for those B-loggers*, their B-blog is a kind of therapy and escape from their reality, where they get to talk and feel that someone is listening, which makes them feel important. Well, ok, someone is listening, then what? The person who is listening today actually has a life and will move on once is gets too cluttered with "important" things to worry about. You and your B-blog are just a stop for people who need to rest their minds after reading "sophisticated" blogs .So, in my opinion, this is not a permanent solution.

My proposed solution for those B-loggers is to sit with yourself and list the problems in your life that end up on your B-log. Convince yourself that nobody is interested in how unhappy you are with yourself –because essentially, it is your own fault- and try to solve your problems by seeking professional help .Make a pledge that you will no longer Bitch-log your problems to the world. Then, simply refrain from posting about topics which you have absolutely no experience in, and focus on adding more value to your readers.

As for me, I have a long list of B-logs to delete from my feed reader because they are simply garbage.

*Short for Bitch-loggers

Jeeran has teamed up with Performancing - www.performancing.com - to bring Arabic version of the widely popular blog editor - Performancing for Firefox.

If you're a blogger and are not familiar with Performancing then you should get out more :)  Performancing is a group of professional bloggers with a mission "To create a home for professional bloggers. A place where those that want to make money from their blogs can learn, and perfect the art of making a living from weblogging."

Performancing for Firefox provides bloggers with a seamless interface to popular weblog platforms such as Jeeran, WordPress and MovableType. It allows them to post to their blogs from a split screen within the Firefox browser. It also features drag-and-drop functionality for more efficient blogging, enabling bloggers to easily insert text or graphics into their posts, and a “notes” tab that allows bloggers to take notes while building and researching posts.

As a result of this partnership, Jeeran's bloggers can upgrade their blogging experience through the power of Performancing and the "open-mindedness" of our blogging engine, which enables integration with any external blogging applocation through an open API -http://api.jeeran.com/blogs/rpc/- wich adopts the universal MetaweblogAPI standards.

I encourgae you to download and use this great application. You will find that you wont be able to live without it :)

Read more:

• Jeeran and Performancing: Enhance your Blogging Experience
• Performancing Teams with Jeeran for PFF in Arabic!
  

I had bought a new digital camera from Amazon.com early this month. It was a really sweet deal, especially for someone living in Jordan.

Today I was browsing Amazon again looking for some camera accessories and stumbled upon the same camera which I bought. I was pissed to see the price had been reduced by $60. It felt I did the wrong thing by buying it then and that I should have waited –I haven’t taken that many pictures with it anyway.

It occurred to me that I should return it and I was seriously considering it. But then I thought I’d call them up and see what they have to say about it.

I explained to the customer care lady that I bought an item less than 3 weeks ago and that its now $60 cheaper. She checked to verify that what I was saying was true, and then said "Very well sir, your credit card will be credited with the amount in 3-4 business days. Is that the only item or would you like to report more items?" ....I didn’t even have to tell her I wanted a refund, in fact I didn’t think I would get one.

Now the sweet deal got even sweeter with $60 shaved off. I sat and thought for a minute…Did this just happen that easily? Without having to ship the item or go through a series of questioning and disgruntled comments?

I guess people in the US take these things for granted, and us mortals in Jordan can only dream and wish we could get a genuine smiling face when we go shopping. Maybe it is supposed to be a dream… but then that would make USA the land of dreams…

Given all the political issues in the region, I can't say I love USA, so I'll just love Amazon.com instead.

It didn't come as a surprise to me, nor -I think- to Arab free email services like Maktoob and Gawab. In today's evolving web, and amidst the heightened competition to dominate the next age of computing, this was bound to happen.

GMail caused quite a stir in the webmail market when it came out, both because of the experience it provided and its 1GB storage. Knee-jerk reactions rippled across the web with everyone raising their storage limits to 1GB. Some actually thought it would be "innovative" to offer 2GB… It was really funny to watch. I hope the brainstorming meetings they held in order to come up with these solutions did not take more than 10 minutes.

The reactions of Arabic email providers reveals an alarming fact; That Arab users don't use them because they provide better value, nor even because they are in Arabic (which is worse).

Arab web companies have always lived in their own comfort zone feeling they have enough barriers to entry that prevent foreign services from taking a bite out of their market share. This feeling in turn provided no motivation to innovate, take risks or push the limits of creativity. The niche which was once an advantage has turned into a wall blocking the exit rather than the entrance, thus putting them always on the defense.

Is there hope, or is it too late?

Arabic e-mail services have been virtually dormant for the past few years with Maktoob sitting too comfortably at the very top and Gawab –for a reason I can’t understand- not competing fiercely to snatch a larger piece of the market.

Just recently –two weeks ago- Gawab released a major update to their service, all focused on enhancing user experience. Gawab's "answer" to the competition was SPA "Single Page Application", which is an extreme expression for what is known and "AJAX" not as fancy sounding.

Now really, AJAX is a nice buzz word, but it is no silver bullet. Incorporating AJAX into your apps will not help you beat the competition. GMail used AJAX and now everyone is doing it, so I can hardly call this an achievement. We expected more from Gawab, being the smaller player they are expected to have more motivation to innovate.

Maktoob have just started releasing a their own facelift after many years of having a somewhat fragmented look due to the large nature of their network which was amplified by several web site acquisitions they made over the past two years. I hope these changes are a reflection of a change of mentality on the inside and that it will soon reflect on aspects other than just the user interface.

Google's entry into Arabic email is a wakeup call for everyone involved in the Arabic web scene, and I hope this time, the answer won’t simply be "A Bigger Gun".

I have decided to start writing a series of articles on CSS because of the many questions I get from friends and fellow developers seeking answers to specific questions like this one.

Creating rich menus has always been a major issue for most web developers. I remember when I first started doing web design back in 97, my jaw used to drop each time I saw a sliding menu or one with rollover effects. Back then if you wanted a really rich menu, you had to use Java palettes, which was rocket science to most designers.

Fortunately today, a wide array of rich interface elements are possible using only CSS and a little JavaScript which can be learned in minutes.

A common question people ask is: How do I create a tabbed menu with rollover effects?

The approach I like most is one that employs CSS, very little JavaScript, and of course HTML. I will start by explaining the HTML components of our menu and then move on to the CSS part.

The magical HTML List:

Almost every designer uses the ordered list <ol>, or the un-ordered list <ul> at least a few times in every project. Most people think they should use it only when they want to create numbered lists or bullet lists. Well, that was true back in the days when the Yahoo homepage had a gray background and Amazon.com had the jungle theme.

Today, it is very important to know what kind of markup you need to use and why. You will come across a variety of ways to achieving he same result and it will be up to you to decide which is best for your case. Having said that, I think there is one rule of thumb that should apply to all cases: Always use semantic markup.

Semantic means "descriptive", hence "descriptive markup". To demonstrate, take the following site menu. The first example does not use any semantic markup:

HTML:

Site Menu
<blockquote>
<a href="/">Home</a><br/>
<a href="/">Overview</a><br/>
<a href="/">Services</a><br/>
<a href="/">Contact</a>
</blockquote>

Notice how the list effect is achieved by using <blockquote> and <br>, which were not made specifically for formatting a list of items. Anybody can use these two tags to display a whole lot of things, none of which are item lists.

The second example shows semantic markup that represents the site menu:

HTML:

Site Menu
<ul id="menu">
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/">Overview</a></li>
<li><a href="/">Services</a></li>
<li><a href="/">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

If we use the first method, only a human will be able to figure out that this code represents a hierarchal list of items. Another down side is that the list may be rendered differently on different platforms, so your list or menu in this case may not be comprehensible on a mobile phone for example.

Another advantage of using the html list is that you can represent a hierarchy of items in the form of nested lists very easily by starting a new list inside any of the main list items. If you wanted to have sub-lists using the first method, you will make a big mess out of your html, and it will just look stupid.

Arrange it horizontally:

CSS:

/*Setting the display for the list items to inline will arrange them horizontally*/
#menu li{
display: inline;
}

Note: You notice that I use #menu as a prefix for all my styles. This is because my main menu ID is "menu". This causes my styles to only affect the html elements inside "expenses". You don't have to use a prefix unless you have more than one menu and you want to have different styles and behavior for each. However, I always like using it as a standard. You can, however, substitute "#menu" with "ul" in your css and it will work just fine.

Note: I used "/**/" in the first css example above. Anything you write between "/*" and "*/" is considered a comment and will not affect your css. It's just to remind you and let other designers know what this style is for.

Give it some style:

We need to apply some styles to our menu to make it look nicer.

CSS:

/*Sets the style for the main menu*/
#menu {
margin: 0px
margin-top: 15px;
padding: 0px;
width: 500px;
}

#menu li {
display: inline;
margin: 0px;
}

#menu li a {
padding: 6px;
border-bottom: 0px;
background-color: #9c0;
text-decoration: none;
color: #fff;
border: 1px solid #666;
}

Note: Those of you accustomed to setting colors in your web page by manually inserting its hex code may find it strange that I used only 3 digits instead of the usual 6 for my colors. Abbreviation is possible when the two digits for each of the basic colors (red,green,blue) are the same, by representing every color with one digit. For example: #99cc00 can be referred to as #9c0, #ff9900 --> #f90, #ffffff --> #fff…..etc. This form is supported in both IE and FF.

Roll it over:

Imagine you could talk to the browser, and tell it to create a rollover effect. You would say: "when the user puts the mouse pointer over the link, please change its background color to white and text color to grey". Here's how we say it in CSS:

#menu li a:hover {
background-color: #fff;
color: #666;
}

Note: "hover" is called a Selector. A selector is the condition which is matched, will trigger the changes specified in the style class to the element which it is related to- in this case the <a> tag in our menu.

Tab it:

You may want to create a tab effect by presetting one of the links to be selected when displayed on a certain page…"Services" for example. You can do that by defining a new css class, for example "selected", and then assigning it to the link you wish to display as selected:

CSS:

#menu li a:hover, #menu selected {
background-color: #fff;
color: #666;
}

HTML:

<ul id="menu">
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/">Overview</a></li>
<li><a href="/" class="services">Services</a></li>
<li><a href="/">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

And you have a menu:

• Home
• Overview
• Services
• Contact

 

Using Css makes your life easier when you want to make changes to your design and helps you think in an Object Oriented manner when designing.A friend of mine asked me to explain how to create a roll-over effect without having to use any JavaScript, so I wrote this for him an thought it's worth sharing.

This tip only works in FF. For IE you'll have to do just a little bit of JavaScript.

To use CSS only in FireFox:

CSS:

.Icon
{
background: url(http://laithz.jeeran.com/blogimages/bul3.gif);
}

div:hover.Icon
{
background: url(http://laithz.jeeran.com/blogimages/bul2.gif);
}

.Icon, div:hover.Icon
{
height: 102px;
width: 71px;
background: no-repeat;
cursor: pointer;
}

HTML:

<divclass="Icon"></div>

For IE, we have to use JavaScript in addition to CSS:

CSS:

.Icon
{
background: url(http://laithz.jeeran.com/blogimages/bul3.gif);
}

.IconOn
{
background: url(http://laithz.jeeran.com/blogimages/bul2.gif);
}

.IconOn, .Icon
{
height: 102px;
width: 71px;
background: no-repeat;
cursor: pointer;
}

JavaScript:

function SwitchStyleClass(Obj, NewClass)
{
Obj.className = NewClass;
}

HTML:

<divclass="Icon"onmouseover="SwitchStyleClass(this, 'IconOn');"onmouseout="SwitchStyleClass(this, 'Icon');"></div>

Enjoy!

Flickr is the leading photo publishing and sharing service on the web. almost every serious blogger has a Flickr account which makes it essential for them to be able to integrate easily between their image collection and their blog.

This integration is now possible with Jeeran Blogs through our Web Service API. It will also enable any third party application/web site to utilize the power of Jeeran Blogs.

Now, everyone with a Jeeran Blog can setup their Flickr account to enable blogging of their photos directly from Flickr.

To know more about how to set it up, please read: Posting from Flickr to Jeeran

It is also worth mentioning that the Jeeran Blogs API is based on the universal MetaweblogAPI standard, so any application that supports this standard can be setup to use the API.

The Jeeran Blogs XML-RPC API end point is:
http://api.jeeran.com/blogs/rpc.rem

p.s. this was posted through Flickr :)

This is a cool ad we created for Jeeran Blogs, which went out to all our members today. Rasha wrote the script, and Tariq Odeh did the sketch… enjoy.

 

"A swicki is a natural extension of personal publishing on the web. Just as you can create a webpage, blog, or podcast, now you can publish a community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want!

A swicki shows a buzz cloud of what is hot in your community and makes it easy to find the best content, news and info on the web."