الحمد الله, and finally, I upgrade my blog to WordPress 3.0.1.  With two boys, our own apartment, full time work, and a few other things (including some motivation issues) I am finding it hard to keep up old habits, despite a desire to continue doing so.

Finding my blog so outdated, though, I wanted to take a step to rectify that, and since HidayahTech is currently running on my ancient server alfaatihah.hidayahonline.net (it’s the first server I ever leased…got it back in August 2004), maintaining software on here is growing more-and-more painful.  I greatly want to move all my sites over to my new server, zaytoon.hidayahonline.net (the current home for Audio Islam, as many of the other sites I host), but that task, too, is proving to be long-running, without only little bits of progress here-and-there from time-to-time.  I suppose that is a topic for another post.  At least HidayahTech is finally a part of the modern era once again!

Assalaamu ʿalaykum wa Rahmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve had much of a presence in the Blogoverse, and part of that is due to just not having the desire to go through, login, and making a post through the traditional WordPress administrative interface. However, until now, I still have not found a blogging client with which I’m totally satisfied. So, I’ve decided to go ahead and give lekhonee another shot.

One aspect for which I have not made an opinion yet is that the interface is basically plain text, and it allows you to post in raw HTML, which isn’t terrible. However, having a rich-text editor really isn’t that difficult to add, so, I’ll just have to see if it’s worth it or not. So, let’s see how it works-out.

الحد لله, I am trying more-and-more these days to practice writing Arabic with actual Arabic letters rather than using cumbersome transliterations.  This is partially due to my father’s abhorrence of transliterating Arabic, lest the skill to actually write Arabic in Arabic be lost.  I agree with him, and besides, it’s a great way to learn the language and get used to using it.  So, as much as possible, I’m going to try to start using more-and-more Arabic, where appropriate, in my typing, by using the actual Arabic letters, إن شاء الله.  If anyone has any questions about what a particular Arabic phrase is, then please post your question.  I will try to include a simple glossary.  Some autolinking would be great, too…let me look for a WordPress plugin for that…

Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve decided that, after upgrading WordPress, I should do a little housekeeping.  As usual, I find a list best presents the ideas I wish to express:

• I upgraded to WordPress 2.8.2 (mentioned here).
• I fixed some posts that had some typos (I usually am good about this, but these had slipped by).
• I deleted some links that really weren’t relevant to me anymore (i.e., Ruby on Rails) and I added some new ones.
• I changed to a new theme (comments welcome!).

I’d like to elaborate a bit more on the last point above, since it merits some discussion and the action is rooted in something I care about deeply.

Previously, for quite some time, I’ve been using the theme “Vidiyal“.  I’ve actually stuck with it for quite some time because of it’s simplicity, elegance, & beauty (in my eyes, at least).  However, a post by the author of the theme really made up my mind for me.  To put it shortly, despite the obligation to release derivative works of WordPress, such as a theme, under the GPL (as that is what WordPress is licensed under), he insists he does not have to.  I’m not so concerned with the legal issue, to be honest, but the insistence not to release the code as free software is what unsettled me.

To be honest, I didn’t really check before using the theme, and I guess I didn’t really care before this.  But now that the issue has been brought to my attention, I have to stick with what I believe is right.  So, I’ve stopped using all non-free (as in freedom) themes, and will only use themes that I know are free software.  I feel this is the better way to go.

I do hope that Sadish and others see that free software, both practically and, more importantly, fundamentally, are important concepts for protecting our freedoms as human beings.  Software freedom is something we should stand up for, and not tolerate being abused or disregarded.

So, with that, I close my rant and resume pretending to be productive.

Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve just successfully upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.8.2, along with several other blogs that I maintain.  I’m really looking forward to the merger of WordPress & WordPress-MU, which, ideally, will make managing multiple WordPress sites on the same server easier to deal with, in shāʾ Allāh.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve discovered a new WordPress blogging client packaged with Fedora – namely, Lekhonee. There aren’t a lot of formatting options, but it appears you can post using HTML, so that’s a plus, I think. Let’s see how it goes.

Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve gone ahead and removed all the microblogging updates to my blogs (the ones titled, “Identi.ca updates for yyyy-mm-dd”).  I thought it would be a neat idea, since I had started using identi.ca, to add some unique content to my blog, but the result was all I was doing was spamming my own blog.  How terrible is that?  Since I already have a sidebar widget that displays my identi.ca activity and anyone can subscribe to my dents directly from the site, I felt the blog updates were just too much.

In an ironic twist, I’ve now enabled my blog to make a dent (the identi.ca term for Twitter’s “tweet”) whenever I make a post using the same plug-in.  In shāʾ Allāh I won’t have the reverse problem.

I just finished re-reorganizing my blog categories after pondering the difference between tags & categories.  Incidentally, I will attempt to start using tags on my blog posts as well.  Subsequently, I will be recategorizing a lot of posts that are categorized in both a category as well as its parent, since that is no longer necessary.  Consequently….hehe, just kidding.

I did add a new category called “Blog” under “Personal” for these kinds of updates.