Thought

a big pause continues

jafar — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:58:52 +0000

Sorry ladies and gentlemen, I have to continue this temporary hiatus until the end of finals. Tough being a college student and all. That’s April 16th. I promise to resume blogging (cough cough, i mean of course, start blogging) at around the 20th. Thank you the precious few who actually check up on this blog. Especially this mysterious person from Foxtrap, Canada who seems to check it quite often. Thank you.

A new start

jafar — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 22:14:09 +0000

Hey now

All you sinners

put your lights on

I’ll start of with the single most annoying thing to start off with. An apology. I’m sorry all of you who know me, and were expecting fantastic content, and those who don’t know me, and didn’t see my work at its best. Now an explanation:

All you children

leave your lights on

I was not all that sure what I wanted this blog to be about. I wanted a way to call out to my friends, scattered across the globe, and millions of social networks. I wanted a place to write, and publish powerful and evocative pieces of work that I never had the opportunity to make in school. I wouldn’t have minded being ridiculously famous and praised for my amazing tech tips, and such. What stopped me?

Cause there’s a monster living under my bed

Whispering in my ear

I admit I was afraid. The internet is a powerful, powerful thing. As soon as I start typing, especially like this, I lose my precious anonymity; my lurker status. It was my shield, my protection. People only knew about me from what I said; or what another said. I had much more control over who saw me. But with a blog? And my ability to spread it? I’ll have to deal with strangers, people who knew more about me than I did about them. My spelling errors, amatuerish poems, and generally the worst written mistakes were there to be witessed. And that scared me.

There’s an angel, with a hand on my head

She says I’ve got nothing to fear

I suppose now I have more confidence in my abilities. Not that they changed much, mind you. I’m just getting used to being more misunderstood, misinterpreted, and mistaken. There’s more, too.
I just can’t hold myself in anymore! I have too much to write about, too much to say!
I have been censored practically every single time I had the oppurtunity to be published. People didn’t understand the message, or thought it was inappropriate for the medium. Now, I am the publisher. I get to choose. And finally, people who honestly want to see what I write; my friends, my family; they can finally see what I write.

She say..

La illaha ill allah

I can worry about my new exposure all I want. It was inevitable. Someone who spends so much time on the internet cannot possibly hope to be invisible. Someone who studies so much, learns so much, cannot hope to be quiet. Someone who reads so much, always feels the need to write. All I can hope and pray for is that it all turns out good. I write something I can be proud of.

We all shine like stars

Something that if my kids ever read it, my children either of body or thought, they could appreciate. It’s time to push fear aside, and put pen to paper. Write. Solidify my thought.

express; as a free man should

Then we fade away

“Put Your Lights On”, Carlos Santana featuring Everlast.

RSS + You

jafar — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:11:22 +0000

I’ll write this once and only once, more for my benefit than yours. I know that actually very very few of you actually give enough of a darn about lil’ ole’ me to visit my website every day/week/month/blue moon to see if I changed anything. This probably has to do with the fact that I change very little on my website, even though I work on it a lot (most of the work goes into fooling around with the code of the site. You’ll never notice it ). So to save myself the trouble of looking like an eager boy with a new toy every time I update this place and spamming you guys incessantly about it (have you read it yet? well have you? read it already!) I’ll teach you about something called RSS. RSS is… Hey! Get Back Here! Come on, its just an acronym dammit, don’t hate it because it’s letters! Discrimination!
Fine, lets call it “feeds”. That better? Jeez. People.

Anywho, it’s pretty easy to use, even for those morons still using internet explorer (God knows why they still do). What is a feed? Its pretty much something that tells you when I update. Not only that , but many of them also pull out the stuff that I post for you to read without actually going to the site! I’m not the only one to use this; practically every blog or site has a feed for you, and there are a thousand services that’ll make custom feeds for you – and it all goes to one place for you to sift through at will- but let’s stick to the simpler stuff.

I’m hungry.

So there are three ways to get feeds,

Browser based
Firefox’s live bookmarks ROCK, but in Firefox 2 they integrate with Bloglines and Google reader. Internet Explorer 7 has a little ‘feeds center’ built in, which isn’t actually all that bad. There are also a plethora of add-ons for both browsers that’ll allow feed ability.
Web based
On the web you have the three big players Rojo, NewsGator and Bloglines. You also have Google Reader, which is quite fast and dependable – plus integrated right into the Google network, which is cool for Gmail users, and there is the up and coming News Alloy for the more experienced guy
Desktop based
I dislike this kind. You have a program on your computer that every-so-often would pull the info off the web for you. Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail are to Outlook as Rojo, NewsGator and Bloglines are to these. Thunderbird is able to do both mail and RSS, sort of melding them into an RSS-mail thing. You can search for these yourself, I haven’t found one I liked yet. One interesting thing they do is podcasts as well, but that’s a different topic.
Email!
R-Mail is a mashup of email subscriptions and RSS feeds. That is… RSS by mail. Useful if you only subscribe to say… me.

Feed me.

A general way to get the feed is usually to add them. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer will show little signals if there is a feed available on that page – and if they don’t there may be a little RSS box (usually orange) that’ll lead you to the feed. Feeds usually look like gibberish. On the newer browsers, they’ll ask you to add the feed. If you want to use the browser based readers, go ahead. For everything else you want the URL so just grab that. Its usually something like http://www.something.com/feed.xml or something. Mine is this. Just go ahead and copy it.

What you do then is fairly simple. All of these readers will have a “Add Feed” section, so all you have to do is paste the feed in and you’re done. Enjoy.

What, you still here? No really, that’s it, just check in that program or site or whatever every once in a while, it’ll tell you if anything new comes up. OK, so since I don’t really update all that much, I’ll give you some of my favorite feeds:

trust me, every blog and most webcomics have a feed, so just look out for them. They make stuff delicious. Speaking of Delicious, Del.icio.us will be for next time. Social bookmarking is the BOMB.

The First Post (as far as you know)

jafar — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:20:48 +0000

I suppose I had best get started on using this. I mean, what’s the point of modding and hacking the crap out of this thing if I’m never going to use it?

First things first, if you received a log on for this site, please do log in, otherwise you’ll miss out on some of the niftier hacks I implemented.

Okay, I suppose I should explain everything. There is a homepage. Ajem-Dragon.com. It links to these places:

This is all personal, ‘k? My Personal Webspace. I may look for a better domain name, I’m getting tired of this one.
Ho hum. Other than that I have very little to say write now; except that I will do more later in the day.