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Goodbye GeoCities…

sjdvda (Saajid Vawda) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:05:42 +0000

Some months ago, Yahoo! announced that it will close GeoCities, one of its services. Today, the 26th October is the day. Nowadays, most people don’t even know what GeoCities is, but for me it is, or rather it was, something very special.

According to Wikipedia:

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).

In my case, it’s not only a ‘web hosting service’ because it introduced me to several things without the knowledge of which I wouldn’t be what I am today. Basically, it introduced me to the Internet. Yes, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway (:P), however-you-want-to-call-it…

However, I won’t take the fact that it’s closing as a shot through the heart or anything like that; it’s completely useless in the Web 2.0 period and should have been improved or closed a long time ago. There are several services which are a million times better that it. For example Weebly or Moonfruit.

[Please not that I'm talking about the Mauritian situation in this article, the rest of the world might have been very different. I wasn't really into technology at that time and can't make conclusions about that. Please not that the internet has come to Mauritius relatively later than most countries, the 90's situation of the rest of the world is like the early 00's here.]

It started in 2005, when 64k dial-up was considered ‘damn cool’, people looked at you quizzically when you talked about something called ‘Google’, I actually used Yahoo! Mail for something other that receiving spam and everybody’s home page was Yahoo! (a.k.a. the Times Square of the Internet).

Bottom line: Yahoo! was in some ways what Google is today.

Back then, I was Saajid Vawda, a 12-year-old to whom ‘Social Networks’, ‘blogs’ and other geeky internet terms were unknown, not ‘sjdvda’, 16-year-old geek blogger addicted to the internet. I didn’t even have a Hotmail address and hadn’t joined hi5.

I wanted to create a web page, and as I was some kind of Yahoo! fanboy, I chose GeoCities even though there were some better free web page publishing services (notably freewebs, now known as webs). It offered 15 mb web space, a little bandwidth, a free page builder and some other goodies. Not much for today’s standards, but at that time, when people here still used floppy disks, it wasn’t bad.

The following are among the many things I got from this once-great web service:

The origin of sjdvda

Most people use a nickname instead of their real name on the internet; here’s mine’s story:

I wanted to sign up for Yahoo! to create a web page and the aliases ‘saajid’, ‘vawda’, ‘svawda’ ‘saajidv’ and ‘saajidvawda’ were not available. I could have added a number after my name, but I hate numbers. I could also have used my full name ‘muhammadsaajidvawda’ but that was just ridiculous. Seriously, what kind of URL is ‘geocities.com/muhammadsaajidvawda‘? lol.

I was in a real fix and couldn’t think about something else, so I checked out the suggestions and among them was ‘sjdvda’. I chose it because it was short and really unique, albeit rather hard to remember.

That’s the origin of sjdvda. :)

HTML

Although GeoCities used a WYSIWYG editor called PageBuilder™, you could edit the HTML source of the page, and that’s how I knew about HTML. Before that, I dismissed it as one of those ‘complicated computer languages’ but after reading some tutorials, I found it rather easy to understand. I didn’t really start to write HTML until 2007, but GeoCities introduced me to this fantastic language who’s almost as cool as English and way cooler than French. :P

Blogging and RSS Feeds

When I built my page, there was an option to add a Yahoo! 360 blog, so I added it. I didn’t even know what a blog was, some Googling Yahooing was needed and after reading some blog posts about blogging (:D), I grasped the concept. I sent an email to some relatives asking them to visit my site and tell me what they thought about it. Imagine the smile on my face when I received some positive and encouraging comments in the ‘guestbook’. Unfortunately, no one was visiting the blog and I gave up after 3 posts. :D I also learned about RSS Feeds in the process.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can’ insert some screenshots of the website because I deleted all the pages last year when I created my first blog.

I say “Goodbye GeoCities, I’ll remember you like people remember their first car or their first love. I’ll remember you, but I don’t need you anymore. I won’t miss you…” ;-) (I’m good at dramatic conclusions. :P)

So, what are the services that have influenced you people?

P.S. I wrote this article some months ago and was waiting for today to publish it. Right now, this would’ve been pretty much impossible as I’m in the middle of exams. :(

Rating: 3.4/5 (5 votes cast)

Blog Update!

sjdvda (Saajid Vawda) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:18:56 +0000

So, I’m interested in blogging again.

Seriously.

I’ve decided to make some changes to my blog to reflect my decision to put some kind of effort in this thing.

1. The Theme

I’ve read that the best way to change a blog is to change its theme, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that because my theme (THiCK) is totally awesome. I chose to change the colors instead. My theme already has 4 or 5 different colors but I don’t like most of them, so, I opened Fireworks and made some changes, applied some filters to the default images until I found them to my taste. I changed them from grey to black because, well, blue is my favorite color. :)

Next, I fired up Notepad++ and made some changes to the CSS so that some headings are now blue. Instead of choosing a more traditional blue, I selected something(#4370B4) close to the “Facebook blue”.

The Result:

Before:

Old Theme

Now:

"New" Theme

It’s neither a subtle change nor a complete redesign, but I like it. It may not look as ‘professional’ as before, but my blog never was, is not and never will be professional. Tell me what you think of it.

2. The Commenting System

Previously, I had been using the IntenseDebate commenting system but I’ve switched to Disqus now. The main reason for the switch is that Disqus has introduced several features over some months but IntenseDebate has not improved considerably.

While I agree that IntenseDebate has better WordPress integration (obviously because it’s owned by Automattic, the company which is also behind WordPress), Disqus is better as a package. It offers Social Media Reactions, Twitter, OpenID, Facebook connect and looks better with the WPTouch iPod/iPhone theme.

3. The Widgets

I’ve moved some widgets and removed some. The MyBlogLog widget now only appears on the front page, it has been replaced by the Google Friend Connect widget.

4. Blogroll

Updated it.

5. Footer

Warning: DO NOT READ IT!!(and don’t say I didn’t warn you after you finish reading it) :P

That’s it for today. That’s the first time I’ve written two blog posts in one day. I hope I can write a lot of posts during my 2-week holiday. :)

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

My proposal for the MBL Logo

sjdvda (Saajid Vawda) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:05:06 +0000

Today, my second term holidays start and I had some time on my hands. So, I decided to create a logo for the Mauritius Blog List. For those who don’t know, The Mauritius Blog List (MBL) is a website created and maintained by Bruno(@blebon) which aims to aggregate all the posts by Mauritian bloggers and display it on a single page. You could say it’s a huge blogroll on steroids. :)

Design Process

I opened up Fireworks and thought about it. In my honest opinion, a logo should be something that conveys the aim/purpose of a product or service (of course, there are some exceptions).

I analyzed the name: Mauritius Blog List. It consists of 2 parts: ‘Mauritius’ and ‘Blog List’. I decided that I should start with the 2nd part.

I created a new 512×512 canvas, drew some black rectangles and positioned them at equal distance:

That’s the ‘blog list’ part.

I added the letters. I used Meta Normal Caps, one of my favorite fonts:

Then I removed some parts of the rectangles to make some space around the letters:

Colors

I had finished the main part, the rest were details. The colors I chose were (obviously) red, blue, yellow and green; which are the colors of the Mauritian flag:

Effects

To make the logo more “web 2.0″-y I applied some effects.

First of all, I added a ‘glass’ overlay:

Secondly, a drop shadow. This gave the logo a sense of depth:

The difference that 2 small effects can cause is simply amazing!

Before posting the logo, I asked for Sun‘s opinions and suggestions and he told me that the ‘M’ could be better. I changed its font to Helvetica and here’s the result:

Sun was right! It’s better.

Favicon

Since it’s a website, it should have a favicon.

A 32×32 canvas and some minutes later:

Badge

Since people who are members of the MBL may want to include a link to it on their blog, I created this badge:

Finished Logo

Here’s the finished logo, it’s transparent and can be used on any background:

Download

I’ve included all the source files (Fireworks *.pngs) and all the normal images (Flattened *.pngs) in a Zipped file. You can download it here.

Rating: 5.0/5 (9 votes cast)

My Firefox

sjdvda (Saajid Vawda) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:28:00 +0000

(click image to enlarge)

Someone told me that my firefox looked cool and I decided to write a blog post with the details

Theme:

Chromifox

(click image to enlarge)

I really like the look of Google Chrome but i can’t live without my FF Add-ons, so this theme was perfect for me!

Toolbars:

Bookmarks Toolbar:

I have the regular bookmarks toolbar with the Share on Tumblr and Share on Facebook bookmarklets

Google Toolbar

The Inevitable Add-on for any Google fan. The Autofill fucnction is really great for people who don’t want to install a lot of extensions although I prefer the one in Sxipper.(continue reading for Sxipper)

Tabs:

I have the setting “hide the tab bar” set to “never”

Tab Mix Plus

This one has so many features that it’s better to read it’s descripion on Mozilla Add-ons.

Undo closed tabs button

Tab Scope:

This add-ons show thumbnails of tabs on hover, similar to Vista’s Aero feature.

Address Bar:

(click image to enlarge)

Locationbar²

Fission

This combines the progress bar and the address bar, like Safari.

Flagfox

Displays a flag showing the location of a website’s server.

Home Page:

Fast Dial

(click to enlarge)

Fast Dial is my favorite and most useful FF add-on, each time I open a new tab or a new window, it appears with all the links I need, either thumbnails or logos of the linked site can be shown. I personally prefer logos to thumbnails because they are much cleaner and better to look at, most of the logos in the screenshot are made by me and can be found on UserLogos, where I’m the 6th all-time top contributor. (hopefully 5th in the near future :D) It’s based on the “Speed Dial” feature in the Opera web browser but it’s much cooler.

Note: I’m using the Beta version.

Details on the background and settings in Fast Dial can be found here

Status bar:

(Click to enlarge)

Colorzilla

Extended Statusbar

Shows speed, percentage, time and loaded size similar to Opera.

Gmail Notifier

Google Reader Watcher

Google Redesigned by Globex designs

This add-on applies a custom theme to Google services such as Gmail and Google Calendar (I’m eagerly waiting for the Google Reader Redesigned to come out of beta!)

FoxyTunes

GreaseMonkey

Linkification

Converts text links into clickable links.

Stylish

Sxipper

This add-on fills my forms, remembers my passwords and generates random ones.

WiseStamp

Allows me to create custom HTML signatures for gmail and Hotmail.

Under The Hood:

Adblock Plus with Element Hiding Helper and Filterset.G Updater

Blocks most of the ads on the internet.

Better Gmail 2

Better YouTube

Better GReader

3 Great add-ons by the senior editor of my favorite blog, Lifehacker.

CustomizeGoogle

Enhances Google search results

DownloadHelper

Enables me to download embedded videos on websites.

Google Gears

Prism

Saves websites as separate applications.

Thanks for having the patience to read this long post.

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, if that is true, then this is my longest blog post ever ;) Larger version @ flickr.

sjdvda (Saajid Vawda) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:17:03 +0000

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, if that is true, then this is my longest blog post ever ;)

Larger version @ flickr.

Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

Redisigning the Bell Village SSS Logo

sjdvda (Saajid Vawda) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 04:19:00 +0000

THIS PAGE MAY TAKE SOME TIME TO LOAD BECAUSE IT’S HEAVY ON GRAPHICS

I had nothing to do today and I decided to redesign the Bell Village SSS(My High School) Logo.

I used Adobe Fireworks for all the work on this page.

Steps I took:

1. Scan the badge

2. Extract The flame icon from the original logo (which I find a little bit boring :P)

3. Add a black border and a slight gradient to the flame colors

4. Place the logo on a big canvas (2000*350)

5. Hide the layer the flame was on and write the letters BELL VILL GE SSS (I intentionally left out the “A” from “Village” as I was planning to use the flame as the letter A). Use the free and well-known “Babylon Industrial” font (My favorite font!!). Download here @ Urban Fonts.

6. Place the flame between “VILL” and “GE”

7. Add the motto of the School “Creativity Empowerment Integration” in a smaller font size at the bottom.