Category: English Post (Page 32 of 97)

How to be a consistent blogger and have fun doing it?

Many of my long time readers keep asking me this question: How do you manage to stay consistent with blogging? To be honest! Blogging isn’t as easy as sending a tweet or updating your Facebook status! But it is very enjoyable and more self satisfying than the two!

The excitement of beginnings

Let’s face it, many people get so exited at the beginning, and would spend hours on end choosing the blog template and colors, customizing it with cool widgets, some go as far as setting a proper sitemap and getting their SEO on. And then nothing, for weeks then for months!! What happens is that early burst of excitement ended and they found themselves with an empty blog with no topics and no readers, and then they abandon the blog once and for all! I know this happens very often, because I’ve been there more than once!

The joy of a new beginning

After a strong start people tend to lost interest fast and drift away from blogging.

Over the next few steps I’ll cover some things I had to overcome to be more consistent which I believe many people face whenever blogging and would like a little help with that.

Success doesn’t happen overnight

If success would happen over night it wouldn’t have been so satisfying would it?
Like many things in life blogging needs some work before you can see the results, luckily it doesn’t take much for your blog to stand up on it’s own and gain interest, besides blogging is so much fun that “work” isn’t actually work when you look at it!

 

Goals and success

 

Set goals for yourself on your blog

Like a successful career or a successful family life, you need to plan your blogging and set clear goals, your goals could be some of these: Create more posts. Reach a certain number of posts. Reach a certain number of page views. All of the above! Any thing you like! And you need to celebrate achieving your blogging goals! (I’ll be talking about it in a bit).

Blog about your passion subjects

If you are interested in sports, fashion, media or politics. Then it is your lucky day! Each of these subjects make a great blog! And those are just example! You can blog about almost anything! And since you are passionate about it. Then writing would be so much fun! Writing about a passion subject is a great deal of fun, you will look forward to blogging and it will be something you look forward to on a busy week!

Link blogging with a daily habit

It’s always a good idea to link an existing habit of yours with a new one you are trying to develop, if you are a coffee person then maybe you want to try to write a post while having a tasty cup of Joe, or maybe blog after coming home from a good run and a cold shower! Soon enough the two habits will become one and you find yourself sitting to blog without even thinking of it. Make sure to keep your drink (coffee or tea) away from the keyboard/laptop or you might spill the contents of the cup on the laptop, ouch!

Enjoy your coffee while blogging
Enjoy your coffee while blogging

Dealing with some minor nuisances

If you feel blogging is a heavy chore then you need to read on! Clearly identify what bothers you and makes blogging less enjoyable. Could be that your chair is uncomfortable and causes you back pain? Or that your computer is painfully slow and makes blogging a living hell, I’ll be posting soon on how to speed up your computer with little to no cost! 
Or that simply you don’t like the place you sit at, then simply go somewhere else!  Now that we took care of the annoying bugs that many bloggers have or suffer from silently on daily basis, lets get to the fun stuff!!

Create a flow

Once you got your minor issues worked out. You can finally sit and work on your blogging. Either it’s the living room shed on lazy afternoon, or your favorite coffee shop downtown, or a park near you that you always feel good when you visit or drop by it for an afternoon walk. Where ever you feel motivated to sit and create is fine!
As long you create a consistent habit that happens naturally without forcing then you are on the right track.
Setting the place and time will help you stay consistent with your blogging!

Don’t chase perfection

It’s unachievable! And you will achieve nothing! Being a blogger is different from being a writer or a journalist as you get a chance to edit your work without the world falling on your head, and since you use a blogging platform you can edit as many times as you like without “stopping the press” and causing a problem! Stop procrastinating and publish those drafts, they are good enough!

 

Perfection
Nothing is perfect

 

Something to add to your resume

When preparing a resume its always helpful to add some interests and hobbies to give a little bit about your personality to your potential employer. Any human resource manager would be impressed to see that you blog on regular basis. Not only that you will gain respect for what you do (as many people aren’t consistent enough to do that) your chances of getting certain jobs will increase compared to others with the same level of skill and experience! (coming from a personal experience).

Did someone say money?

Money is the power that moves the world. Love it or hate it we all need money to live. You can make money off your blog with some basic advertise strategy such as Google Adsense. If your blog is a heavily visited one then you can make a decent amount of money doing what you love and having fun connecting with your fans. That’s inspiring 😉 Even without money involvement, the sense of satisfaction of knowing that your writing could inspire another human, help them solve a problem or change their lives to the better is the best feeling ever! Blogging will help you reach people you never dreamed you could ever reach and have a positive impact on their lives!
Write with good intent and good things will happen!

Money
Money $$$

Be proud with what you do

You work hard on your blog, so its OK to brag a little about it (don’t be a jerk and ruin it for the rest of us!) It’s a blogger’s duty to offer a helping hand to his readers and be sociable and modest with them Encourage other people to blog too! You might think you aren’t that good, but compared to an absolute novice you know a lot! Get them started on the basics and offer some support and that is guaranteed to rekindle your love with blogging!

 

Connect with other bloggers

Seems like a given, but some  bloggers isolate themselves from society and don’t communicate enough with fellow bloggers. It would be a good idea of get together with other bloggers who share your interests, it will inspire you to write more and grow better as a blogger in general!

Connect with other bloggers
Connect with other bloggers

Reward yourself

It maybe silly! But offering yourself a little reward after writing a post and publishing it could wonders! It depends on you and what you think of as a reward. It could be something simple like a candy bar or something more meaningful as a walk on the beach (if you happen to live near one).
If a reward can encourage a student to study, why not you?

Have fun blogging!

Blogging should be something you enjoy doing! An escape from everyday stress and drama and a change from your daily working pace (unless you work as a professional blogger, then I have some bad news for you!).

Blogging is fun
Blogging is fun

 

You are making a difference

Since you are blogging about the experiences you had and your journey through life, you are helping someone else without even knowing it! When blogging the world is your stage and you may never know who read your post and felt better about themselves and decided to change their lives for the better. Therefore you are making a difference and it’s only a matter of time before someone tells you that! It will make your day, trust me 😉

I hope these pointers help you jump start your blogging career! Share them with your friends and family, and let the blogging spirit spread!

How to fix and prevent the /dev/sda1: recovering journal On Ubuntu 16.04 Gnome

As I was booting my computer up one morning I saw this awful error message rather than the Ubuntu Gnome boot logo, it turned out to be a common error and can be fixed easily, let’s get to the details!

/dev/sda1: recovering journal

Cause of the issue

The problem occurs when the computer isn’t shut off properly or when electrical failure happens, some data on the SSD

isn’t stored properly and the boot process is halted.

In my case it’s the power issues that ruined my laptop battery and is making it’s way to my data stored on the SSD. 

How to fix it

The screen itself suggests a terminal command to fix the drive which was useless in my case, my easy fix was using a live Linux installation from a USB -I used Linux mint- and used Gparted to fix the damaged drive (please note that using Gparted can be very risky and cause data loss). 

Using Gparted from a live distro

We are using Gparted to fix the partition, it depends on how you did your disk but it’s the same way.
Entering the password to run Gparted.
Opening Gparted


  Viewing a list of disks on your computer.

View disks with Gparted


 Checking the drive for errors with the right click menu.

Checking the disk for errors using Gparted

We now click Apply changes.

Applying changes using Gparted
After applying changes we can safely reboot, the fix is done!

Making sure damage didn’t happen

ِAfter rebooting the computer will open as usual, but we want to make sure that the drive wasn’t damaged, to do that we will install a small command line tool called Smartmontools 6.5 and it can be downloaded from this link.

Installing Smartmintools-6.5

Samrtmontools is a terminal utility
to check and monitor disk performance. 

To install Smartmontools we need to un-compress the tarball and we do this from the terminal

  tar zxvf smartmontools-6.5.tar.gz

The previous step created a directory called smartmontools-6.5 containing the code. Then we go to that directory, build, and install:

 cd smartmontools-6.5

  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install

After running these steps we managed to install Smartmintools-6.5 tarball from the terminal.

Running Smartmintools-6.5

Run the command:  sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda. And if the results are like the the screenshot your drive is safe, as it says clearly: No errors logged.



How to make the fix automatic on every boot

Instead of performing the fix every time the issue happens, it’s easier to set the config autofsck to run at every boot. 


Edit the file etc/default/rcS and change the FSCKFIX from no to yes by using this terminal command:


gksu gedit /etc/default/rcS
Here it opens a gedit windows, navigate to the last line.

Editing /etc/default/rcS

Change the FSCKFIX from no to Yes and save to finish.

Editing /etc/default/rcS

This way every time the issue occurs the system will automatically fix it and continue booting normally. 

This is how to fix and prevent the /dev/sda1: recovering journal on Linux Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 and similar distros, it’s really easy to fix but it can be scary and ruin a day for you if you don’t know what to do.
And I highly advise you to backup whenever possible

An unusual weekend: Comi-con and FM radio!

This weekend comes as a change from my normal weekend routine that I have settled into in the past few years since graduating from college, which consists usually of me hanging around endlessly checking social media, or hanging out with a friend at a coffee shop (checking social media from there), the same friend at the same coffee shop, it gets boring after a while, doesn’t it?
I decided to step out of my comfort zone and try to do some activities even when there isn’t much to do around here.
Please note that the weekend in Libya is Friday and Saturday.

Comi-con Libya Logo
Comi-con Libya Logo

 Friday: Comi-Con Libya

On Friday I decided to go to Comi-Con Libya (short for comic book convention), it was a chance to meet up with an old friend  of mine who works 6 days a week and usually spends his holiday with his family, I wasn’t really interested in going but I went to humor my friend and spend a day with him, what discouraged me is that I knew the team responsible for organizing Comi-Con split up and now instead of having one Comi-con we had two (following the fashion of political disagreement and multiple governments maybe?).

This is the first event of it’s kind in Libya and the crowd was big! I was really glad that many younger people came to the event dressed in super hero and anime characters themed shirts, some were actually dressed in cos-plays and most of them were pretty good!

 

Cosplayer, image by Mohimen Battor

 

 

Cosplayers, image by Mohimen Battor

 

Video game contest, image by Mohimen Battor

 

A group of cosplayers, image by Mohimen Battor
One of the banners at the Comi-Con by ItsYoBoiBary

It just shows you that people in here are sick of war and being afraid all the time and want to go out, have fun, and do what people normally do.
If you like to learn more about it there is a fantastic post about it in Arabic from Razan’s blog, where she gives an introduction about the event and discusses some of the controversy that surrounded the whole thing.

 

Power outage ruined the opening day!!

I’m afraid that I arrived at such a bad timing since the electricity was out, so most of the functions like the video game contests were off waiting for the power to return (It’s almost as the guy who is cutting the power had a sense of humor choosing the timing of the outage on the area) having most of the functions stop was bearable compared to the weather inside the hall! It was like a sauna inside! The hot and wet atmosphere made it impossible to breath, let alone to enjoy any of the rather interesting things inside the convention, because of that I can’t really give an honest review of the event, and it’s the same reason I don’t have any pictures, simply because the light was terrible and I couldn’t get a decent shot of anything (all the pictures here are taken by people who attended and each picture is credited and taken by permission of author).

What would I have done if I was in charge?

If I was organizing this, I’d try to move the convention outside (or at least some of it) since the weather was terrific, or try to ventilate the place naturally by opening the doors and windows  so you don’t cook the people in their sweat! The people outside would push themselves in you say? That’s why you have security, right?
I went home almost right away, it was nice but I had another thing that needed preparing.

My first radio show appearance

Before getting out to comi-con a got an invite from an FM radio station to be a “special guest” on one of their shows, I showed interest on social media before and asked to be kept on the short list of guests. The host (Sara) asked me to prepare some material for the episode which was about recreational reading, an introduction of myself for the listeners, and my top ten favorite book list. I prepared that and sent it to the Sara and confirmed my participation in the episode.

Saturday: Preparation

I spent  the following morning trying to locate the station because I wasn’t familiar with the place, I tend to drive here and there around it but never actually went through that particular street, I asked a friend for directions and took a couple of shortcuts to save time while trying my “hit and miss” approach, it wasn’t long before I was at the station.

Inside the radio station

It was a very clean place and the people were incredibly friendly to me even when I clearly just met them, and before I know it I was inside the broadcasting room with the headsets on my head participating in the show, the hosts: Sara and Tasneem (Taz) who spoke fluent English (This channel is the only channel who presents live English shows in Libya) were clearly quite the busy readers and knew what they were talking about!
I read a ton of books and still enjoy reading, I came back with a bucket list of classic books following the episode And it being my first time talking live on the radio you bet I was nervous!

My take on the episode

It turned out to be a good episode, I tried not to hijack the episode raving and ranting endlessly (because I hate when radio hosts do that!) and that was my aim from the start, I was told later that I didn’t talk as much as I’m supposed to do by my family members who listened to the show, I believe that less is more sometimes.
And I didn’t take any photos because my phone was off during the broadcast (trying to be professional that’s all) and I forgot to take some pictures after the broadcast ended!

I think I might do more radio appearances, it’s fun and interesting, I forgot to mention that I work on another radio show for a different channel as an editor, I might even try being a host on that show and will blog about it here if I ever got to do that.

Final words

This weekend was different because I stepped out of my comfort zone and gone out to do things I don’t normally do, it’s unusual and knowing myself this won’t happen again for a while, it’s either feast or famine for me!

I hope you enjoyed this piece of writing, please tell me what you think in the comments section below and tell me: How was your weekend?

Share my blog with your social media circles and help it grow!

LibreOffice is more than just a MS office alternative

The timing couldn’t have been more prefect, with Libreoffice convention just ending and as we enjoy the freshly released LibreOffice 5.2, this post has been siting as a draft for quite some time! It’s about Libreoffice taking the lead as a unique word processing suit.

Many websites that claim to be expert on software label LibreOffice as a “drop dead alternative” for MS office, some are down playing LibreOffice by calling it: the best of the “free” bunch, those are still a little better than the guys who can’t tell LibreOffice apart from Apache OpenOffice (I am afraid that OpenOffice might be dead already)!
Those are the people who rather use a pirated MS product than to use LibreOffice, for shame!
The only thing that LibreOffice has in common with MS office is the “word processing” part, and other than that, LibreOffice is a different project completely!

If you think that LibreOffice is just a meek second for MS office, then you need to think again!

LibreOffice is not a MS office copy cat!

Some people download LibreOffice thinking it should look and feel like MS office and should even act the same, and when it doesn’t they get frustrated and blast the entire open source movement for not copying MS office’s look and style.

 

The unique interface on LibreOffice write explained

A lot of that frustration comes from the fact that the buttons aren’t arranged in the same way, or that the theme doesn’t look the same as it does on MS office, it doesn’t look like MS office, here is a little shocker:  It’s not supposed to look like MS office. It’s a completely different product! LibreOffice wasn’t made to be MS office lite.

There are numerous word processing suits that look and feel like MS office for a fraction of the price, but if you want the MS look and feel I suggest that you invest in a licensed copy of MS office, plain and simple!! 

Other than looks, there are some serious complaints regarding compatibility.

Compatibility issues broken down

Another major complain is that documents edited in MS office don’t look as it should on LibreOffice, and that has a reason as well, let’s look at the first reason.

ODT vs OOXML

LibreOffice uses ODT file format by default, which stands for open document text, while MS office uses the OOXML standard, which is used and imposed by Microsoft as the standard for all documents, it is changing gradually as many countries are adopting the ODT standard and started to impose it on companies, even Microsoft!
Now that we covered the document standard, it’s time to look at another huge issue, is the fonts!

Fonts

Fonts used in MS office are a part of the office license, you can’t simply download them and use them on another computer that doesn’t run MS office, that wasn’t discovered until later! And the document foundation are doing what they can to help replace the fonts effortlessly within LibreOffice.
So when that .docx document looks horrid on LibreOffice, remember who to blame!

Let‘s take a look at some of the features that make LibreOffice a unique suit.

Cross platform and portable

While MS office is only available to Mac users and Windows users (since it’s a Microsoft product), LibreOffice is available to almost every computer platform out there, no matter what kind of system you have, you can enjoy LibreOffice’s power!

And, you can use a portable version of it, if you don’t want to mess your current settings, or you are in a domain and can’t install software, you can have LibreOffice on a USB and run it from there, I’d like to see MS office do that!!

A swiss army knife of tools 

  • LibreOffice can do so much more than meets the eyes, it has a lot of hidden menus that can preform so many awesome tasks, I’ve blogged about it in detail in this post.
  • LibreOffice can be used to write and layout books easily, with adding a few extensions and using some features the right way, I’ve also blogged about it in this blog and you can find it here.
  • Finally, I’ve managed to improve a way to use LibreOffice draw to design mind maps, I suggest you check it out from here.

Pricing

This is an obvious one, but it had to be mentioned!
I stopped following MS office news a while ago, but the last I know is they have two payment plans: One time, and a monthly subscription with many license forms like student, home, etc. While LibreOffice comes free of charge, and all donations are welcomed!

Development speed

While you get one product per year from Microsoft, one cloud and one regular, the Document Foundation rolls out a version of LibreOffice every month, that fixes bugs and adds features, with a major milestone every six months. That’s on the Fresh branch, but if you don’t like living on the fast lane, you can go with the Stable branch and enjoy stability, it provides updates not as often as Fresh but quicker than MS office!

With these obvious advantages explained, let’s look at the organization behind LibreOffice

The Document Foundation

The document foundation is an independent self-governing meritocratic entity, created by former leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community, in the form of a charitable Foundation under German law (gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts).
It continues to build on the foundation of ten years’ dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community.

The Document Foundation logo

It was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent Foundation brings out the best in contributors and will deliver the best software for users.
It is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities.
It welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community.
The Document Foundation is proud to be the home of LibreOffice, the next evolution of the world’s leading free office suite.
Please support our efforts: Your donation helps us to deliver a better product!

The team

LibreOffice is a community project by the document foundation, with thousands of programmers and volunteers working on the project passionately around the world to make LibreOffice a better product, who is the MS team responsible for MS office? I don’t know either!

One might argue the age old Open Source VS closed source argument that has been around since the dawn of computing, well.. It’s here also!

Community

The LibreOffice community like many open source communities is the place to get support, with friendly people willing to help and share their knowledge and help fix bugs and issues. It’s also available in many native languages, without extra fees.
It’s one of the best – if not the best – open source communities out there!

LibreOffice has been around for six years, how much impact did it have globally?

Global Impact

LibreOffice exceeded Apache Openoffice record download of 100 million in a few years! It took Open Office over a decade to achieve this record number of downloads, and LibreOffice is been around for six years!
 
People from all over the globe are using LibreOffice on daily basis, entire cities are converting to LibreOffice to reduce licensing costs.
LibreOffice communities are emerging all over the world, spreading the culture of open source and promoting the use of LibreOffice, chances are there is one where you live!

Other projects

Here are some other projects that aren’t directly linked to LibreOffice, but a part of the on going development at the Document Foundation.

LibreOffice cloud

There are efforts to make LibreOffice is available in the cloud, to be able to use LibreOffice inside the cloud without the need to install it on your computer! A lot like Google Docs!

LibreOffice Android viewer

This app is terrific for viewing documents you created on the go from your smartphone, it’s available on the store for android.

Impress remote 

it can be used as a remote to navigate through your presentations without added software! Brilliant for students, teacher and office workers alike! You can download it from here for Android.


Conclusion

So there you have it, LibreOffice, the open source project with over 20 years of heritage from the Star office days, taking the pure open office soul you loved, and turning it into something spectacular! One of the best open source projects out there if not, the best! Much more than a “word processing suit”, it’s truly a lifestyle!
Feel free to download, create, and share with your friends and family, and please don’t forget to give back to the wonderful people behind LibreOffice to keep it going!
if you aren’t sure how much to place, think of how much MS used to cost you and pay a part of that to the document foundation.

How did you like this post? Tell me what you think in the comments section below. 
And share it on your social media please!

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