whats the plot » website

عسل وطحينة

ahmedre — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:03:35 +0000

i wanted to write about my experiences in egypt, and so i started a new blog (i decided not to write those posts here because they’re not highly technical or programming related (or geeky)). you can find it at masr.whatstheplot.com.

website changes

ahmedre — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:18:29 +0000

after having pretty much the same theme since the launch of the site, i’ve switched to the excellent iNove wordpress theme. i’ve also cleaned up some links and replaced the previous code highlighter with the very nice syntax highlighter evolved plugin.

back-tagging the site

ahmedre — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:20:37 +0000

so i went through and tried to back-tag all the posts on the site… more difficult than it sounds, especially since i was at a loss as to how to tag some of the things (especially in a consistent manner). i am not showing a tag cloud yet, but maybe soon ™.

i’ve also added links to my twitter and flickr in the sidebar. i guess i should start looking into some wordpress plugins at some point in the near future for some of the stuff in the sidebar.

*update* – tried showing a tag cloud, but i don’t really like it… things i don’t care about surfacing get surfaced because they end up being “bucket” categories and things i do care about don’t :p

i like the tagging so i can have, for example, snippets as the tag for all the posts that have code snippets in them, and pictures as the tags for all posts that have pictures in them, and so on… but i guess kind of like del.icio.us, if i think about the correctness and consistency of my tags too much, it starts to bother me :p

whatstheplot: iphone edition ™

ahmedre — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:18:25 +0000

thanks to the iwphone wordpress plugin, the blog now looks a lot better on the iphone!

speaking of the iphone, i am really disappointed at the notion that the long awaited sdk coming out on 3/6 will potentially be locked down. i guess we can’t know for sure until the announcement on thursday, but i personally have gone ahead and re-jailbroken my phone, courtesy of zibri’s ziphone.

eid mubarak, wordpress 2.3, etc

ahmedre — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:08:28 +0000

sort of late for this, but eid mubarak! just upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.3, i guess i’ll have to look into going back and tagging some of the old posts at some point in the future ™.

in unrelated news, one of my coworkers pointed out the applegeeks lite comic to me. one of the writers of this comic is muslim, and he had some pretty funny comics, especially around eid time. here’s one for kicks:

source: applegeeks lite.

google reader shared items

ahmedre — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:12:43 +0000

i’ve gotten used to using google reader for my rss feed reading. one of the nice features is the ability to share interesting items. i decided that i might as well start using this. here is my shared items page, and here is the atom feed. i’ve also added a link to the side of the page.

better permalinks

ahmedre — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 06:22:04 +0000

now switched wordpress to use a more readable url format for permalinks rather than the classic ?p=### style urls. thanks abu hurayrah!

new domain!

ahmedre — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:12:43 +0000

the site can now be accessed at whatstheplot.com. going to slowly phase out piousity insha’Allah (piousity.net 301 redirects to whatstheplot.com, so there should be no broken links). anyone have a good idea for a new secondary title? the old one was “the latest plot at piousity.net,” but that doesn’t really apply anymore…

i need to find another good theme for this site or make a new one for it at some point…

three books, wp 2.0, etc

ahmedre — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:37:26 +0000

peace… i installed wordpress 2.0 (actually, its been installed for a few days now, i installed svn version right before it came out because the download link was broken). as you can see, no asthetic changes here… but the control panel is much nicer… really beautiful. in addition, i installed a plugin (spam karma 2) to deal with the comment spam… so far so good, lets see how it fairs over the next while.

in any case, after watching the excellent (yet depressing) syriana movie, mansoor suggested i get the book the scorpion’s gate by richard clark – so i picked it up and also picked up dan brown’s digital fortress (at the recommendation of emad).

syriana by the way was excellent… i say it is depressing because of the fact that what it portrays feels like a very accurate picture of the state of matters as they are now. i also watched munich, but i didn’t really like it. i felt it was very one sided, and i could not enjoy a movie whose plot was to kill muslims…

also, there is a new book, “islam & terrorism… myth vs reality,” by mauri’ saalakhan… it was just published recently in answer to a particular book that was attacking islam. should also be an interesting read.

i came across a pretty neat looking arabic typing tutorial program (open source) – its called kitab (kitab.sf.net). have not downloaded it yet, but from the screenshots, it looks good.

that’s all for now…

moved to dreamhost!

ahmedre — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 06:08:46 +0000

greets…
i’ve just moved the site to dreamhost. i have been using shieldhost for a while now because it is rather cheap. but recently, i’ve been irked with some of the things they’ve done (i had another domain hosted there too which i was pretty sure was set to auto bill my credit card every quarter, but then they stopped billing me and stopped the service, claiming that i didn’t pay… well yeah, you don’t charge me, i don’t pay…), and sometimes, i just couldn’t access it…

so i decided to jump ship to dreamhost. i’ve had dreamhost since the middle of this year actually, i just haven’t been using it. i got in on the “777″ deal (one full year of service plus domain name was like under $10, and i think after that its like $8/mo) a while back for one of my domains, but even several months later when that site finally went up, i didn’t host it at dreamhost. so i figured that i might as well give dreamhost a shot since i have it.

so far, my impression is that they’re awesome… especially compared to shieldhost. the nice thing is they let you host multiple sites on the same account, so even at $8 a month, it comes out to the same that i was paying with shieldhost roughly for the several hosting accounts i had on there.

anyway… more later.