Tag Archives: Blogging

My Answer To The Question: Is having an online reputation on sites such as Quora important for young people?

Social SitesToday I’ll be sharing with you another answer I’ve added to Quora. The question I answered was:

Is having an online reputation on sites such as Quora important for young people?

And here’s my answer:

In a direct way, only specialised sites count. For programmers for example, a high rank in StackOverflow might be valuable to some employers.

Apart from that, for a site like Quora or so, a high rank will possibly be just like contributing to charity or playing a team sport. A little nice thing for the HR person or cultural interview.

However, there’s more…

Answering questions will likely require you to research topics that you thought you know, when you start explaining them, you get the areas you miss and you figure them out to complete the answer. As the old saying goes, best way to really learn something is to teach it.

Even if a normal answer like this one I’m providing  Just writing your thoughts does help organize them, which is a very good both mental and writing exercise.

So, in short, it’s nice, very nice to have, although not necessarily that important.

Authoring Introductory Articles: The Pitfalls I See As A Reviewer

Authoring Introductory Articles

Just finished replying to an author who asked me to review his introductory article.

The lesson learned from reading and reviewing is that there are some quite common pitfalls to these kinds of articles, which are essentially the same thing:

Thinking That One Size Can Fit All

You are writing an introductory article, so, you target beginners, but even for beginners, you have to assume some level of common ground as a foundation to build on, but how much of a common ground is that? IS the author targeting those who have experience with similar tools/concepts? Students? Professionals with other (unrelated) programming experience?

Sometimes it feels like the author keeps changing his imaginary idea of the intended audience as they keep writing. Eventually the author finds himself inserting some hints and references that if the reader understands then they probably don’t need to read your article (except to review it).

Which leads to:

Unlearning is hard

Just simulating not knowing what you know already. Yes, it’s not that easy!

If you are an author

When you work on any kind of introductory material (which is different from these posts you write just because you want to “take the thought off your chest to the wild”), always be very strict about:

  • Who you audience are
  • Who your audience are not

Identify them by what they do, and what experience they had doing what they do. Be honest with yourself about this identification means they’ll actually benefit from your material or they’ll just congratulate you on it (if you know some people who fit into the audience) without real benefit.

Think of what they are “not” more often as you keep writing. Check every assumption about the audience that you make in the material against the “not” bit.

You may find it hard. Depending on why you are working on the educational material, it may simple be worse changing the intended audience. If this happens without lots of modifications to the work you already did still, it means neither of your images about the intended audience were correct, not the original one, and not the new one too.

As A Reviewer

A reviewer also has their own challenge…

How to use Unicode in WordPress slugs (Urls) on Windows 2008 / 2012 (IIS 7 & 8)

Background

My wife has a bilingual weblog. She writes in Arabic and in English. One thing she noticed is that when she writes a post in Arabic, and does not specify a post slug (URL) manually, WordPress will generate a slug in Arabic based on post title (which is encoded to equivalent URL Unicode escape characters).

The problem is that URL was quite unusable, going to the the URL (say, by clicking the post title in homepage) would redirect to blog homepage instead of the post details page, making the inaccessible except in homepage and category index page. She had to go back and change the post slug to something in English to make it accessible / linkable.

Putting aside whether it’s a good idea or not to have your URL path / post slug in Arabic or Unicode in general, I knew I have seen it before, and it really should work without much effort.

The Solution

Luckily, someone had a StackOverflow answer that did help me. the problem seems to have something to do with the implementation of the FastCGI module in IIS 7.x, and IIS 8 / Windows Server 2012.

The relevant link was a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that suggested: * A Service Pack install, which did not help much, because I already keep my hosting VPS always up to date with regular Windows Updates * A Registry fix, which did the trick nicely

The Registry Fix

The KB article suggested this as an example, I just copied the following code, went to Start -> Run and pasted it in:

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\w3svc\Parameters /v FastCGIUtf8ServerVariables /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d REQUEST_URI\0PATH_INFO

It didn’t work instantly though, I also needed to run IISReset to get Arabic URLs to work.

And that was it!

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools: Copy HTML To Windows Live Writer

Just a quick note, if you install Productivity Power Tools For Visual Studio 2010.

It has a nice feature.. Copy code as html. The feature doesn’t add any new menu option or whatever, simply when you copy the code the usual CTRL+C or Edit -> Copy way in Visual Studio, and paste it in a text-only editor like Notepad, it’ll be treated as text normally, but if you paste it in an HTML capable editor like Microsoft Word, it’ll be paste as HTML.

Note

If you already know what the feature is, and have a problem with Live Writer 2011 or similar version, you can skip to the title that mentions it.

image

  • If you wonder how  made this rectangular selection, you can do it by pressing ALT before selection and holding as you move the mouse to continue to select
  • If you wonder why, simply to avoid the spaces on the left in the pasted code

If I paste this in notepad, nothing new!

image

 

But if I paste in Word 2010 (Outlook is the same)

image

(it can be better if play with font size and text wrapping options)

 

Or in Visual Studio HTML Designer

image

Note

If I paste in source view or any other code-editor view in Visual Studio, it WILL not paste as HTML but as normal text. This is intended, because when you do copy / paste inside Visual Studio, you want it to just work, not have to clean all generated HTML