Feedly: A Magazine-like Start Page

As I became addicted to Google Reader since a while now, following posts and RSS is a big part in the geek side of my life since then. Recently I discovered Feedly. Feedly is a RSS reader with a magazine-like start page which contains cover page, a digest, the latest information, friends and comments.

It is easier to organize your shared items into categorizes. It is also easy to see comments and tweets on items and also to see links to the item all in the same box.
You can see more friends who share the same items or similar items to yours.  

There is this new tool called "Karma", it is used to follow your tweets on Twitter and to see how many clicks and retweets your tweet got. I didn't test it yet as I didn't create a Twitter account for me till now, and I don't think I will any time soon. So, it would be great if one of you could test it and tell me how he finds it.

But to say the truth, there is one thing that I didn't like about it, which is if there is a site with no unread feeds, it will appear empty. I hope there are some settings to make it show all feeds even if they are read.

I started using Feedly since almost two weeks so, I am kind of new to it. It has so many possibilities that I read about but haven't discovered them yet. Till now I didn't leave Google Reader as I am still holding to both, Feedly and Google Reader, till one of them provide all the needs for my feeds.

You Might As Well Jump!

While reading in different blogs and moving from one link to another, I ended up reading about the new Blogger Birthday features in its 10 birthday.


One of these new release is "Jump Breaks" which enables you to create a "Read more" link in your post. Of course, it could be done using HTML in your post editor, but by using the new post editor, you can do it with only one click.

I have this blog with many long posts and pictures that take time to load. So, I decided to give it a shot.

I enabled the new post editor here and then edited all my long posts with only ONE click.
It didn't take more than two minutes to do it. and you can see the results on my other blog "Mind City"

You can read all about "Jump Breaks" here.
Try it yourself, it's really worth.

SFD: One Big Day with Security

Today was one big day in our festival and this is for two reasons: unusual speaker and unusual topic. The speaker was Eng. Mohamed Sayed, a senior administrator at Yahoo!. He is an amazing guy who has a lot of experience and great attitude. He is such a friendly person. We had two sessions. One with the topic "Openly Secure", which was a simple presentation about basics of security and using open source software in building secure infrastructure. The second one was about "Secure Tunnels", which was an introduction about building a virtual network tunnel to work through to be more secure. Although I don't have a big background about networks and security, I understood almost the whole session. There was a code part to demonstrate a simple PF policy on OpenBSD that I didn't understand but I got the main idea behind it which was a good thing. Really, it was nice sessions and two of the best sessions we had in Software Freedom Day. The good thing for us as organizers that there was variant audience with variant levels of experience and all of them were pleased with the two sessions. We had a really good feedback from them. I hope we can have Eng Mohamed Sayed again in other sessions. At last, I can only say, Thank you, Eng Mohamed. We all had a great useful time.

SFD: First Day ... Let the FUN begins

Today was the first day in Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University and couldn't miss the chance without telling you how it went. For me, it starts with everything going wrong. I wished I never got out of the bed. I was supposed to be at college at 9:00 am, and I wake up early to be there on time but since the moment I wake up, everything went wrong which resulted in leaving home at 9:00 am instead of 8:00 am. At this early hour, it normally takes 45 minutes to reach college but since it wasn't a normal day, it only took 80 minutes. By the time I arrived, I found SFD team working on counting the giveaways we have, arranging everything and finalizing some stuff that we needed to print. When we finished everything, each one took his T-shirt and his name tag then we started the day.... We had almost 500 online registrations before the event, but as the known rule says that "It is only one of each four online registrations will show up". So, we were expecting about 100 to 150 persons to show up. For our surprise, it wasn't 11:00 am yet (the time of the first presentation) and there were about 150 persons there. By the time the second presentation started, I believe there were more than 200 persons with different ages, from secondary school students to department managers in known places who wanted to change their system to open source. It went crazy during the break, with all this number confirming his registration, taking his prize, joining a study group, watching a demo or asking about everything. Most of the giveaways were distributed. First 50 persons who registered online had special giveaways. Giveaways were bags, pens and a huge number of cds, Ubuntu 9.04, Open Solaris and different open source programs. We had a huge amount of pictures, but I appeared in a little number of them :(. All pictures will be available on Flickr. I will edit this post when I got the link or I will send it in the next post isA. The most important things that everyone attended today went home satisfied with what he got. Speakers were happy with the attendees and satisfied with the presentation environment. These are the only things that really count. By the end of the day, I was tired, exhausted and can barely move but it was a successful, fun and satisfying day. I hope the next two weeks will have the same fun and success. SFD....Let the fun begins :D

SFD: My First Steps

This is the second post in my series about Software Freedom Day@Alexandria University To say the truth, I was supposed to post this one about a week ago but I have been dead busy. So, I will try to make it up in this post. I consider working at SFD one of the most event I had ever enjoyed while working in till this moment. I participated in previous events, but SFD has its own taste. I enjoy my activities at SFD as I am working with an amazing people. They are so ambitious, creative, organized and hard workers. Each one knows his duties and does it in silence. Every one shared his opinion and expressed his thoughts. SFD Team is the best. In the past period, we were organizing the whole event. I engaged in several long discussions and two meetings till now. As I enjoy playing with images, having the chance to design the T-shirts was sooo fun for me. Of course, we had a voting among the team to see which design the team likes the most. But I believe I had the final word :D The biggest steps we had done in the past period was having our registration page and finishing the program (which I will talk about in details in a separate post isA). Don't forget to register for our event here Our program is available here I think this is all for now. See you in my next post.

InkScape

In the past few days, I discovered a new program to design and edit images. It is called "Inkscape".

As part of my activity at "Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University", we needed to customize some logos of the event. The official site of SFD suggested Inkscape as it is an open source program, so I decided to have a look at it.

I was surpissed how easy it is to edit something or event create something from scratch. I didn't try a lot of programs before. But as I remember, I had a difficult experience with photoshop for example.

Another feature in Inkscape, which I personally think it is its main power point, is that each line in the image is a vector that you can easily change. You also can change the size of the image without worring about its resolution.

There are versions for different platforms starting from Windows to Linux and MAC. You can check their website: http://www.inkscape.org/download/

I hope you like it as much as I did.

Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University

As this is the most recent activity in my Technical life, I decided to start with talking about it. "Software Freedom Day 2009" or SFD09, I heard about this event about two weeks ago. I had no clue about what it is, who do it or anything about it. As it became one of my duties, as ACM Chapter Officer and OSUM Club Organizer, to hold this day on our campus, I start searching for a while about it. And here is what I discovered: Software Freedom Day is an international day to celebrate free software and open source community. It is been celebrated by organizing sessions, contests and even parties!! Its main target is to encourage more people to use free software and be happy while doing it. As the team I am working with on organizing this event always seeks for the best, and we are always looking to be different, SFD09 is no longer one day on our campus!! It is two weeks full of sessions, demos, contest and the most important: knowledge and entertainment. For more information about SFD09 @ Alexandria University, check the following links: Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University-Wiki Page Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University- OSUM Club If you are near Alexandria from 1st Sept to 15th Sept, don’t forget to RSVP our event on Facebook: Facebook Event I will regularly post the newest news about our SFD on our campus. So, keep checking my blog. Hope to see all there.