Favourite blogs for Shu-Hao's blog

The Need for Innovation in UK Universities

Here is a short video I created to demonstrate the importance and goal of my PhD study concerned with helping UK universities become more innovative.

Note: You can use higher resolutions for better quality (HD).

: 22 Feb 2013 17:45 |  Tags: Innovation Kingdom United Universities |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

TEASER: Benefits You will receive after participating

As part of my doctoral studies, members of staff from UK universities who participate will have access to a number of useful free resources. Here is a sample (teaser) of these resources:

Reviews of Useful Tools for use in Education

Nowadays, there are many tools and technologies that can be used by both teachers and students in universities or even schools. Therefore, I developed an interactive website where I write short reviews of some of these useful tools and technologies and give examples of how they can be used. Here is an example:

Many tools/technologies are reviewerd and categoried into different operatnig systems

Each tool/technology will have a summary along with any useful links (such as education discounts)

and specific rating

From 0 to 380,000 Fans: Can we use Social platforms in Education?

There is no more doubt today that social platforms can be used in education or to enhance learning. There are many examples of such social learning platforms including YouTube Education, iTunes University and much more.

I have been personally interested in how Facebook can be used to enhance or disseminate learning and useful resources. Therefore, back in 2009, I started an Arabic sceitfic research Facebook page. Now, I have over 380,000 fans and conting. This is all a personal effort! The Facebook page gained quite a lot of attention in the Middle East and it still do.

It is been almost 4 years now and I have gained quite a good experience from this. Therefore, I created a rich presentation of the good practices and lessons learned which I would like to share with you.

If I, as an idividual, was able to get this far and help educate thousands of people from over 15 countries, I am sure universities can benefit and achieve much better, especially since this can be used for marketing as well!

Use of Twitter in Education and Research

In addition to the two resources I have prepared for you above which I will share with you after taking part in the study, I would like to go ahead and share with you NOW some useful resources I came across recently. They are focusing on the social platform Twitter and how it can be used in education and research.

To thank you in advanced for participating in the study, here are the links:

• An extensive and useful guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities published by LSE.
• Using Twitter in Research by Salma Patel.
• Using Twitter in the classroom. Also, here is a similar one for the use of Twitter in Education.

If you are a member of staff working within any UK university, please go ahead and participate in the study to receive access to the rest of the free resources:

Participate in the study (Link will be updated soon)

: 22 Feb 2013 16:39 |  Tags: Benefits Doctoral Research Study |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

MindMap: Presentation Tips

Here is a Mindmap which I've created after going through the 3 excellent workshops on presentation skills presented by Adair @ The university of Warwick and reading a number of books. I hope you guys find it useful!

presentation2.pdf

: 12 Jun 2012 11:50 |  Tags: Mindmap Presentation Skills Tips |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

IKEA…You Fail at Customer's service…

To start of, I usually put the URL when I talk about something. In this case, I am not even going to put any links to IKEA's website so that they don't benefit from any visitors and search engine ranking.

Long Story Short

I bought a large desk. The desk was delivered damaged. I called IKEA over 3 weeks to replace it, every time they say we will send someone, they give me a date and no one comes. After that I decided to return the item, before the return period runs out. They say OK, we respect that and we will send someone. Of course, they give me a date, no one shows up. I call, they give me another date and no one calls or show up and the story goes on and on and on. The last appointment they gave me was last Saturday. No one called or showed up...

There is clearly a pattern here and they could go about doing this for quite sometime...I am not willing to try how long it will take them though! although someone else with more free time and a since of humour might have found it to be a good way to test how bad their customer service is.

Waste of Time

I am really annoyed by how much time I've wasted chasing them, when a one call should have been sufficient. Clearly, they don't care about customer's time. Imagine yourself chasing a company for almost 2 months and every time you call you are put into a queue and you wait to get someone to answer and once someone answers, you spend sometime explaining the problem, waiting for the employee to check the records, wait for him to explain how sorry they are and that they are going to fix this for me.

Lack of Trust !

Needless to say after hearing the phrase "Sorry for the inconvenience" and "We will sort this out" over and over again, I lost both trust and hope in IKEA. Hence, writing this post. Apparently some companies have used these words for too long that they have forgotten what they mean.

Can you help?

Since I am an international student, I am trying to understand what steps could be taken. Obviously I want my money back! and also, I want the damaged items taken from my apartment.

After 2 months of calls and live chats, I know I gave IKEA more than enough time. Now I am done waiting, I want to follow possible legal or other actions that can be taken to resolve this issue once and for all. I can't waste more time chasing them!

Therefore, if you read this post and you have any experience with companies not wanting or bothering to honor their return policy for any reason and you have took an action to resolve that, I would really appreciate your input. I know about the legal advisors at the university's Students Union and I am just not free this week to check with them and I thought some visitors might be able to help!

Oh...One more thing!

How would you feel if you experienced something like this? Please let me know in the comments!

: 29 May 2012 15:17 |  Tags: Customer Disaster Furniture Ikea Service Union |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Good…and the BAD…

I am a Muslim and I am proud to be one. Islam taught me to be respectful to others, and I hope that I am good at doing that! If not, please let me know :). I am keen to correct the bad image of Islam caused by the media around the world by respecting and helping others, helping those that need, by participating or contributing to great causes or organisations such as UK Heart Foundation, UK Cancer Research among many other things. Of course I am not writing this as a show-off, rather, to show that I care about others and I know I am not the only Muslim doing this.

The world is full of injustice, especially injustice towards Islam or Muslims and in some cases treating them unfairly.

Here are a few comics that I've found and I wanted to share. Unforutantelly, I gave up finding the source so I couldn't add it or mention it.

Conclusion:

As with everything else in this life, there is the good and there is the bad! but I know you already know this!

The question is, did you do your research before making any judgement? Of course I am not talking about Islam here, I am talking about everything!

: 17 May 2012 20:11 |  Tags: Islam Muslim |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Scrivener, a great writing environment!

Writing about web page http://drhariri.com/blog/1384/scrivener/

Note: this is a summary of a blog post I wrote on my Arabic research blog (برنامج الكتابة الرائع Scrivener), a blog that I have been running for over 3 years, aiming to spread knowledge and resources to help postgraduate students and researchers in the middle east.

For a while, I have been finding it more and more difficult to use Microsoft Word for writing, especially when it comes to bigger documents.

I often find myself thinking about where to write a certain chunk of text and even if I decided, it is sometimes hard to quickly reach the section that I want to update/edit.

A couple of week ago, Paul, my supervisor, started a discussion with me on how best to store and work on my thesis. He suggested that I use a feature that exists in MS Word where documents can be linked together to a certain master document. So, I went ahead and decided to learn about this feature which I have never heard of before. However, while writing, it came to my attention that some users reported their files and projects becoming coprrupted as a result of using this feature. So, I decided that using it is too risky, so here is an X for that.

I decided to look for alternatives, and all of a sudden, I remembered a certain software called Scrivener, which seemed very inetresting to me about a year ago so I decided to follow their Twitter account back then.

I decided to visit their website and I found out that they have already released a Windows version as it only had a Mac version back then and although I use a Mac mainly, I didn't start using it back then.

I took a look at the introduction video and their website and it was fascinating to me to find out that many novelists, authors, journalists and even researchers have been using Scrivener and have been very happy with it.

I also started googling Scrivener and found that others are using it in education and research.

The main concept behind Scrivener is that it offers a great writing environment where documents are split into chunks of texts. Those chunks could be chapters, sections, a few paragraphs or a few lines. The beauty however about Scrivener is that if you decided to combine all of those chunks into a single document for printing or sending, this can be done automatically and very easily using Scrivner's compile feature.

What this means is, if you are writing and do not want to worry about structuring or stylying at all, you can do that without any problems, and once you finish you can tell Scrivener to combined everything and format it in a way you specify. So, you could tell it to format chunk's titles as H3, for instance and to format any higher level groups as H2s or H1s.

The big advantage in this case of course is, your writing space is always there and you are free to add as many chunks of texts or images as you want.

Scrivener of course is more than just a writing environment, it has many geat features that I suggest you check.

Inregration with Reference Management Software

Since its important to me to have the ability to insert citations within Scrivener as I currently do in MS Word, as it has my Mendeley's plugin installed, I decided to look for possible ways of integration. to my surprise, there was no way to do this with Mendeley at the moment. However, it seems that those using Endnote or Zotero have a better luck as both of those reference management software offer an RTF scan feature that can be used to update citations and references list once the final document is made.

This is a quick video showing how Endnote can be used with Scrivener:

And here is the longer version of it where the author, a PhD student, explains how he uses tools like Evernote and Scrivener in his research activities.

Any hope for those using Mendeley?

Well, personally, I wouldn't turn down a potentialy beneficial software just because it doesn't work nice with another one. In this case, I decided to use Scrivener and insert citations manually like I usually do anyway. However to stay alerted to where they are I write them, for instance something like (John, 2000), then, I highlight them in Scrivener.

I don't see a huge problem of not being able to automatically use Mendeley within Scrivener. However, I decided to tweet those @Mendeley_com and @ScrivenerApp to see if there are any chances for an integration between those 2 to be born, and to my joy! they said that they have met and they are working on something that will make it possible for Scrivener and Mendeley to play nice with each other! So, let's hope that they develop something for us very soon!

Join the campaign and spread the tweets for a Mendeley Scrivener integration!

By the way, if you use Mendeley and would love to use Scrivener, don't be shy to do just what I did, LET THEM KNOW!. go ahead and tweet to both of those great companies how you love to see an integration as soon as possible.

If you are new to twitter, use something like:

Hi! I'm very interested in an integration between @Mendeley_com & @ScrivenerApp please!

: 22 Mar 2012 17:50 |  Tags: Scrivener Thesis Video Writing |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Atlas.Ti 6 vs NVivo 9: A Comparison

Follow-up to Potential uses of CAQDA software packages from A.Hariri's

A couple of days ago I received an e-mail from one of my research blog (in Arabic) followers asking for my opinion on choosing NVivo or Atlas.Ti. I've sent her a summary of some of the issues that I faced when I tried both of them.

Today, I was asked by a friend of mine, Salma Patel of why I chose Atlas.Ti over NVivo as well, therefore, I decided to write a detailed post about this to help those who may be looking into this as well.

I found that Atlas.Ti 6 and NVivo 9 were two of the most used software packages out there. So, I went ahead to do some research and I decided to try them both. I ended up choosing Atlas.Ti although I was much inclined to use Nvivo for the following reasons:

These are what I think some of the key issues I based my comparison on, when it comes to features, both software packages offer very similar set of features.

After writing this comparison, I have to say that I do not hate NVivo, I simply think it wasn't for me. Others may find working with NVivo is better for their own reasons. I still follow the development of both NVivo and Atlas.Ti, and I still retweet some of their announcements and so on to my Research Blog (in Arabic) followers.

I hope some of you out there find this helpfu! and I am happy to learn about your experiences with any of the mentioned software packages.

: 01 Oct 2011 02:34 |  Tags: Analysis Assisted Atlasti Caqda Computer Data Nvivo Qualitative Software |  Comments (11) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Potential uses of CAQDA software packages

About a year ago, I was looking into Computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDA) software packages that may help me in doing my literature review by allowing me to code certain passages within documents into codes that I could then easily explore or retrieve.

I think one of the potentials I saw in some CAQDA software packages is that if you code useful passages within lots of papers and documents into codes (which are similar to keywords), this will make it easier for you to retrieve those stored passages of texts within different documents.

For example: if I have read 100 PDFs and assigned things that I believe relevant to my research into codes, it would be much easier to just output the passages that belong to a certain code within those 100 PDFs in 3-5 pages (since other information within each document will be hidden) showing where every passage came from and how they can relate to each other (You can use relationships between them too!). This would surely be much easier than having to check all those 100 PDFs to try and find bits and pieces here and there that belong to the topic I am trying to write about.

Another potential where I personally think CAQDA could help is building a rich research library of journal papers and different documents over the years. Because, in many cases, a PhD might be the first step of your research career, especially if you are a lecturer or someone that is interested in publishing journal papers in the same field. I guess what I am trying to say is, lets assume that while doing your PhD you come across 100 journal papers that you consider important in your research field. After that, you become a lecturer at some university where you are expected to do more research. So you read more journal papers and you assign more information to codes within the CAQDA software. After a couple of years, you could have a very rich library of papers that you have already read and classified into certain codes or keywords.

After that, all you have to do really when you want to write a journal paper is ask the CAQDA to output information related to a keyword and start writing.

For instance, you may choose to first write a background, so, you output background information which you store in a code. Next, you may choose to become more specific, so, you may want to identify previous gaps and even gaps that may still be in need of research. You output information assigned to a code "Gaps in....." and you find all different arguments by different authors, etc...

I believe that using a CAQDA helps a lot when it comes to writing, if it was used by the researcher while he was doing his literature review.

I know that some would argue that it is not good to just read certain parts of the paper and assign them and just forget the rest of the paper may see like taking things out of context, but this is only true if the researcher himself didn't pay attention to that.

Of course I am only scratching the surface here as most CAQDA have much more advanced and useful features such as reports & networks diagrams where you could visually show the relationship between different passages. For instance, you could show a number of authors disagreeing with author A while may others are supporting him.

I have been working with a CAQDA software (Atlas.Ti) mainly as part of my literature review as I believe it keeps me organised and helps me find information that I have already looked into much faster than I would usually do. I will continue to use it as I go on with my PhD and I hope that I learn more about it and try the various features available and be able to share what I find or anything new later on.

: 01 Oct 2011 01:50 |  Tags: Analysis Assisted Atlasti Caqda Computer Data Nvivo Qualitative Software |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Wordpress Mac Permissions Issues with Zend Server CE

If you have installed Zend Server CE on your computer to use as a development server, you may have ran into the issue of Automatic update not working on Wordpress. This is the function that usually updates your Wordpress plugins and Wordpress system or core files. Furthermore, another related problem that you will likely to have as a result of this is that you won't be able to have Wordpress edit your .htaccess to change the way your blog URLS look like.

The cause of this problem is that the Apache user used by Zend Server CE (User: daemon, Group: daemon) is not given enough permissions to be able to make changes to your files on your Mac. The solution to this should be simple, at least it worked for me right away.

The Solution:

• Open your Terminal application (Applications -> Utilities)
• Use the following commands in bold:
  

1. Navigate to your htdocs folder that was created by Zend Server CE using something like:
   cd /usr/local/zend/apache2/htdocs
2. Change the user of your blog folder which resides within the htdocs folder. In my case my blog folder is called blog, so I used this command:
   sudo chown -R daemon blog
3. Change the permissions of the folder using:
   sudo chmod -R g+w blog

• Now, try to update your Wordpress plugins or Wordpress system itself (core files), this should have solved your Wordpress Mac permission issues. In my case, I didn't restart and it worked. If it doesn't work rightaway on your development environment, try restarting your Mac.

Note: The solution above worked for me because I don't allow any network access to my development environment, if you for some reason need better security, you should probably check Zend Server's documentation to follow their suggestions with regard to how to make your development environment safer.

Hope these steps work for you!

: 21 Aug 2011 09:08 |  Tags: Ce Issues Lion Mac Osx Permissions Server Wordpress Zend |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Qualitative Research related blogs

Writing about web page http://merlien.org/news/qualblogs.html

A great list of qualitative research related blogs by Merlien institue. Can be found here.

Do you have any similar excellent resources? Share them please!

: 27 Jan 2011 18:00 |  Tags: Blogs Qualitative Research |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Visual Understanding Envrionment

Writing about web page http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

Wow. A really amazing and interesting open source tool. You have to check it!

: 20 Jan 2011 01:44 |  Tags: Mapping Mind Understanding Visual |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Mendeley

Writing about web page http://www.mendeley.com/

From Mendeley's website:

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

• Automatically generate bibliographies
• Collaborate easily with other researchers online
• Easily import papers from other research software
• Find relevant papers based on what you're reading
• Access your papers from anywhere online
• Read papers on the go, with our new iPhone app
• View more features…

Mendeley is one of the new software/services that provides advanced references management features.

What I liked in Mendeley

What I really liked in Mendeley is that:

• It can sync your references between multiple PCs/Macs.
• Allows you to read, annotate & comment on PDFs from within the software itself.
• User interface is very nice!
• Can be set so that it starts watching your resources folders, adding every paper/document that is added to these folder to the library itself while tagging these auto added documents as 'To be reviewed' so that you can review and confirm that every bit of information is correct.

If you have been using Endnote (like me), you will be happy to know that you can export your Endnote library to Mendeley directly. Ofcourse, this doesn't mean that you can't use Endnote at all if you swich to Mendeley. You can work on Mendeley and if for any reason you wanted to insert bibliographies from Endnote or for any other reason, you can export your final library to Endnote and use it.

Research & Decide yourself!

Lastly, I just wanted to know that although I see Mendeley as a good choice for referencing management, etc.. However, I don't want to influence your decision in anyway!

You should spend sometime comparing/researching whatever software you are aware of, for example, for me, I ended up comparing Endnote, Zotero and Mendely. I quickly took Endnote out of the equation for a number of reasons such as its lack of easy sync features and inability to edit PDFs within the software. Lastly, I ended up choosing Mendeley over Zotero because:

• Zotero is a Firefox plugin. Therefore, it relies on another software which really adds another variable into the situation that could go wrong. For instance, what if there were some problems in Firefox? What if Zotero become unstable or incompatible for any reason with one of Firefox's future updates? Lastly, what if Zotero affects Forefox's performance?
  
• Mendeley's ability to edit PDFs within the same software is just great!
• The ability to watch folders within Mendeley is nice!

Therefore, it really depends on your work style and the set of features you might require which can be available in a certain software and not in the others.

Do you use any of these?

If you are using one of the mentioned software, I would really like to hear your experience. There might be features that I am not aware of in any of these mentioned software.

: 12 Dec 2010 22:10 |  Tags: Bibliographies Endnote Management Mendeley References Zotero |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

NVivo 9 Tutorials

One of my friends told me that his friend suggested that he uses NVivo for management of sources and qualitative data analysis. I have never heard of NVivo before so I wanted to give it a try. I downloaded the software and installed but still didn't really have the time to give it a try.

Furthermore, while searching for relevant reviews. I found that there is a good number of people who have suggested the use of NVivo in Academic Research and most certainly by PhD students.

I am really interested in finding what others who have used/are using NVivo think about it. I know that there is a need for some coding, but since I am going through the new journal papers I am downloading I will probably scan be able to code quickly.

One of the advantages of using NVivo is that it allows me to see all the sources related to one node (Theme or topic). Which really saved time especially if you are talking about having 100s of papers in your library. Being able to assign certain parts of papers to different nodes/topics is a really nice and very helpful feature!

I don't want to waste a lot of my time learning about NVivo 9 and testing it until I know for sure that it can help. Therefore, I haven't started using it.

I am actually hoping that some members of staff or some visitors would shed some light as to if NVivo 9 is indeed helpfull for me as a PhD student or not.

So, if you have any experience using NVivo 9 or any previous version, please let me know how it was. Did it help you get better results? Was it worth it?

Below are a number of videos that explain certain basic parts in NVivo 9, in case you wanted to learn more about it.

Introductin & Overview

Importing Sources to NVivo 9

Linking Cases to Attributes in NViv

Connecting Sources to Demographics in NVivo 9

: 09 Dec 2010 00:09 |  Tags: Nvivo Qualitative Research |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Thumbnails in Wordpress 2.9+ and 3.0+

Now that Wordpress added a thumbnail feature (2.9+), we longer need to assign custom fields and give them values each time we write a blog post. Insted, while writing a blog post, there is a small panel or block to the side that allows us to choose a thumbnail for the post.

However, for people like me, who have been using custom fields to show pictures for sometime, there is a decision to be made. Should we stick to the custom fields and just continuou using them or should we start using the core thumbnails featre instead?

Well, you don't really have to the choose one of these two, you will keep using them both. How you ask? Well, simply, stop using custom fields for any new posts you write and use the thumbnail feature to assign thumbnails to blog posts. Then, edit your templates and add some simple conditions so that Wordpress checks whenever a blog post is viewed if it has a custom field thumbnail or a core wordpress 2.9+ thumbnail. By doing this, your old blog posts thumbnails will still show and your new thumbnails, the one you assign using the new feature will also show.

Honestly, I was very worried about having to choose one of these two, and since I am not a programmer/developer/coder, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to figure this out. However, with some thinking and imagination and with the help of a number of great Wordpress articles I was able to use my thumbnails in my Blog homepage. Not only that, but using some of the new features related to thumbnails, I was actually able to set specific sizes for the different pages in my blog. For example, on my homepage, all posts thumbnails are 100px x 75px. However, when a visitor clicks on a certain blog post to view it, he is shown the same picture but in a different size, say 200px x75px. This is really nice and it's really simple to achieve.

As I said, I am not a programmer and I was able to figure this out with the help of the following resources. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to get similar results :). I would also like to thank each one of those blog authors:

• Bulletproof Post Thumbnails in WordPress 2.9
• WordPress 2.9 : Display post image with backward compatibility
• Using The New Post Thumbnail Feature In WordPress 2.9
• The Ultimative Guide For the_post_thumbnail In WordPress 2.9
• New in WordPress 2.9: Post Thumbnail Images
• Everything you need to know about WordPress 2.9′s post image feature

If anyone (not good with coding as I am) wants to look at the code I have used in my template pages to show the thumbnails, I would be happy to share.

If you want to check what I was talking about, you can visit my Arabic Research Blog. Don't ming the language, but make note of the thumbnails then follow some of them to the post view page to see if the thumbnail's dimension will change or not. Please note that because some of the thumbnails are actually cropped, they might not show in a bigger size if you follow them to the post.

: 07 Dec 2010 01:59 |  Tags: Blog Custom Fields Images Post Thumbnails Thumbs Wordpress |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Get Your Research Library Organised with Zotero

Writing about web page http://www.zotero.org/

Zoter.org:

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Honestly, I find it one of the best tools available for researchers. really!

Zotero video:

Check Zotero's website for more information.

Zotero's features:

• Capture Research Data
• Archive the Web
• Store related PDFs, files, images, and links in your library
• Take Notes
• Drag and drop bibliographies anywhere: into an email, a blog post, or any word processor
• Plugins for Word and OpenOffice make it easy to drop in references on the fly
• Zotero comes preloaded with all major styles, and thousands of additional journal-specific styles are freely available
• Get the best of both worlds: Work locally with your research materials and automatically sync your data between multiple computers
• Even without Zotero, you can access your collection from any web browser. You can even view your collection on mobile devices like the iPhone.
• Share your research with the world and make your library and collections public
• Create group libraries to collaborate with other Zotero users
• And Many more...
  

So, What are you waiting for? Get Firefox if you don't have it and give Zotero a test drive :)!

: 05 Dec 2010 06:07 |  Tags: Bibliographies Citation Management References Research Tools Zotero |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Wordpress Link Library plugin

Writing about web page http://yannickcorner.nayanna.biz/wordpress-plugins/link-library/

Wordpress Link Library plugin is one of the most useful plugins I have used for Wordpress. Not only it allows you to show your links along with their categories in a nice way that can be easily formatted, it also allows your Wordpress blog visitors to suggest new links, this was very helpful on one of my websites as I needed a way to allow others to do this.

Other features include: the ability to set an RSS icon for each link and show/hide links descritions. ofcourse, there are many more!

I have been using Wordpress Link Library plugin for quite some time on my Arabic Research Blog, in the Research Links Library and Link Library Wordpress plugin have proven to be a very useful and stable plugin.

Lastly, the Link Library plugin's developer Yannick, is also very useful and helpful when it comes to answering any questions related to any of the Wordpress plugins that he developed, and his blog is the biggest indicator of his will to help others. Thanks Yannick!

To view some examples of how this plugin can be used, visit the Link Library plugin and look under examples or configuration.

Lastly, if you find this plugin very helpful (like I did), please don't hesitate to donate, as this will help keep the project going and help Yannick with any costs related to the maintenance of his blog or as a little incentive for him to keep going :).

: 12 Jul 2010 17:20 |  Tags: Library Links Plugin Wordpress |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Learn and Create Facebook Applications

A few months ago, I wanted to create a simple Facebook application which allows me to show few items from an RSS feed in a Facebook Tab in a specific way I want. However, because I had no idea whatsoever about Facebook Application development, I spent days trying to figure out how I could create an application that would do that for me. And what made this worst is the fact that I hate programming in general and I had no clue where to start a Facebook application from.

Facebook Application Development Training Videos

Finally, I saw an item on Amazon which claims to teach Facebook Applications development. At first, I was very sceptical and I thought that this item is probably going to be useless. However, I decided to order it anyway hoping that these CDs will be of any help and therefore, save my time, as I spent days and days researching...

Click on the Image For more information

The CDs included video tutorials which explain everything clearly! Although you might find a bit of repetition here and there, I found that I learnt quite a few things from the CDs, and I have found the source code included to be really helpful too!

If you are like me, Zero in programming and Zero in Facebook Applications development and you need to learn a few basics things in order to create your very first Facebook Application, give this a go!

Please note that a few parts of the CD are outdated due to Facebook updates and/or bugs. However, the rest are very valuable!

Example of the Facebook Application I have created

After learning a few things from the CDs, I managed to create what I wanted to do. To view an exmaple, please visit this Facebook page which I am working on for a cousin of mine.

Shirts 2 Go

From this page, visit the Shop tab and Enter the UK/EU Shop.

Let me know of what you think of what I have done so far :) . I am open for any suggestions for improvements if you have any, as this is stil my first Facebook Application!!

: 08 Jul 2010 16:06 |  Tags: Application Development Facebook Learn Tutorials |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

البحث العلمي

Writing about web page http://drhariri.com/blog/links/

قمت في موقع د. حريري و البحث العلمي بإنشاء دليل البحث العلمي، و الذي يتم من خلاله جمع العديد من الروابط للخدمات و المجلات و المنشورات العلمية المختلفة و أي مواقع علمية، و التي أقوم بزيارتها شخصيا أو يتم إقتراحها من قبل زوار الموقع.


إذا كان لديك أي روابط تود إقتراح إضافتها إلى دليل البحث العلمي، لا تتردد في زيارة دليل البحث العلمي، حيث ستجد في آخر الصفحة نموذج لإقتراح رابط جديد.

الأقسام المتوفرة في الدليل حتى الآن:

• المجلات و المنشورات العلمية
• مكتبات و محركات بحث الرسائل و الأطروحات
• مواضيع و توجيهات في جمع البيانات
• مواضيع و توجيهات في البحث العلمي
• محركات بحث عن المراجع العلمية
• أدوات مساعدة
  

: 03 Jul 2010 11:58 |  Tags: Arabic Links Research Resources |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Facebook Like button on your Wordpress blog

Writing about web page http://ottopress.com/wordpress-plugins/simple-facebook-connect/

A couple of months ago, Facebook released new Facebook Social plugins that can be used on any website. The benefits of using these plugins includes: creating a stronger link with your Facebook fans, allowing your blog visitors to share stories, recommendations and anything with their friends or anyone they have added as friend on Facebook.

For marketing purposes and in order to grow your website/blog visitors and fans, it is really important to integrate some of these Facebook Social Plugins into your blog, to allow your blog visitors to easily share anything they like or comment or the various things on your blog.

Facebook Social Plugins for Wordpress

One of the plugins that I found very easy to use to integrate Facebook Social Plugins into your Wordpress blog is through the use of Simple Facebook Connect Plugin.

This Wordpress plugin is easy to use, and includes almost all the functionalities and plugins you might want to include in your blog (Comments box, activities, like, share, etc...).

Facebook Like Button in Simple Facebook Connect

Although the mentioned Wordpress plugin above allows you to add almost all the Facebook Social Plugins easily, there is a simple step that you can do to improve the Facebook Like button that comes with the same Simple Facebook Connect plugin.

While the Facebook Like button (Read here for what this plugin does) will work as it should after implementing the plugin, whenever someone presses the like button on an artcile on your blog, in their facebook account, it will show that they like your website while showing your website name.

While you do want others to see your website name, you wouldn't want it to show like this on anyone's Facebook profile. Simply because lets assume that a visitor likes 4 posts in your blog, and he goes on liking each one of them. After he's done, his Facebook profile will show 4 different lines saying the same thing that he he liked "This Blog", which is stupid and non-informative at all as to what he liked there...

Like button Additional information

The solution to this is very simple if you are using Wordpress, all you have to do is provide additional information (using Open Graph Protocol) in your Wordpress theme you are using, in the header file (usually header.php) in particular.

Open your theme's header file and anywhere between the <head> and </head> tags, use the code shown Here (Can't show within the post as it is HTML), then save.

After adding the header tags shown, visitors who like any post on your blog will have more meaningful information shown in their Facebook account as the post title will be shown, and whenever they like another post, a different title will be shown. Less repitition, More information and better for your SEO (i think)!

Now, go ahead and press on the like button in one of your posts and check your Facebook profile to see if this is working!

: 25 May 2010 19:53 |  Tags: Button Connect Facebook Like Plugins Social |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Joomla 1.6 on its way

Writing about web page http://www.joomla.org/component/content/article/5252.html

In a previous post in this blog, I talked about a great Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla and I included many general and specific information regarding this CMS.

Now after the long-time Joomla 1.5 has been out, many (including me) were looking forward to the new version of Joomla 1.6. This is because many important features that were not available in Joomla 1.5 are going to be available in Joomla 1.6.

One particular feature that many can't wait for in Joomla 1.6 is called ACL. This feature basically allows Joomla administrators to create various groups while giving them different permissions and access rights. This was not available in Joomla 1.5 and many of us had to use commercial extensions to have such feature. However, with Joomla 1.6 coming out soon, we will finally be able to do that without the need for any extensions!

This is a quick preview of Joomla 1.6, you can take a look at some of the changes coming.

: 25 May 2010 13:05 |  Tags: Cm Content Joomla Management Systems |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem