Ants

The very first insects I ate. According to my mom, I became very adept at hiding them from her, tossing them into my mouth when she wasn’t looking. I can’t remember how they tasted but they must have been good — I hope…

Crickets

I almost tried these once back when I was little and loved to eat every creeping thing. My mom slapped the poor insect out of my hand — the way she did when I attempted to eat a cockroach (if you’ve ever eaten a roach, I’m still curious as to how they taste). I heard they’re good though.

Grasshoppers

As the house captain in secondary school, I got a lot of presents from parents and their kids alike. I really think it was during this period I ate the greatest variety of food. Roasted grasshoppers were crisp, but that was that. Most of the taste came from the sauce I had them with.

Grubs

Larvae of some insect (don’t ask me which) found in rotting palm tree logs. On a tastiness scale of 10, I’d give them a 12. If you haven’t seen them before, they’re what Timon of Lion King fame relishes, and no, you won’t have to spit them out like Pumbaa does.

They’re found mainly in the South (at least I didn’t see them when I was up North) and very popular in the Niger Delta. People traveling a lot by road have probably come across brown ‘things’ on sticks sold by the hawkers chanting ‘edible.’ I guess most people decide not to try it when they discover ‘edible’ means ‘edible maggots.’ They’re not maggots…

Locusts

The insect that inspired this post.

I still don’t know how to differentiate between locusts and grasshoppers, but if you asked me, my answer would be along the lines of ‘locusts taste better’ — especially with palm oil and pepper. I’d give them up only for termites or grubs.

Termites

I ate a handful of these only once when I was hungry in secondary school. A friend of mine had a bag of roasted termites. On the tastiness scale, I’ll put them right behind grubs. They’re simply awesome and crunchy.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had any opportunity since then. The same friend ate them raw when it was time for them to swarm. According to him, they were just as tasty, but I couldn’t be persuaded to try stripping the wings off one and throwing the wriggling, very-much-alive ‘mite into my mouth.

What insects have you eaten?

The men were standing in a row outside the police station as naked as the day they were born. One of them had both hands covering his crotch. A policeman noticing him, moved in and delivered a stroke with a whip to the robber’s shoulder. He pulled his hands away and stood one with the others, displaying shriveled specimens of male flesh.

In line with the group, I made out a woman. Unlike the men, she had not been ordered to strip but it was apparent from the welts on her skin and the stony, brazen expression she wore that she had been involved. She had earlier tried to hide her face behind her hands. With dexterity surprising for someone her size, an overweight policewoman kicked her in the groin.

I scanned the crowd out of curiosity. It was comprised mostly of women. For a while I wondered if they were present to look their fill, to ensure the woman was not forced to go naked like the men, or both.

A man standing beside me was shaking his head sadly. “This isn’t good. No matter what they did, they shouldn’t be paraded naked.”

“It’s good for them,” a woman who overhead him retorted. “If they’re not humiliated this way, they’ll never learn.”

The people watching the armed robbers were more interesting to me than the robbers themselves. I was more repulsed than amused at the looks on their faces and I wondered if I wasn’t among savages.

In those moments I thought of the story my aunt had told me a year before. She works as a seamstress at Mile 3 (Port Harcourt) but there was a time she couldn’t handle the images of burnings that occurred nearly everyday, carried out not by traders as is usual elsewhere, but by policemen and women, so-called keepers of law and order.

A mother was at home, attending to her washing when a group of mobile police approached and demanded her son. The story was that he had been involved in some petty stealing the day before.

Unfortunately for the woman [and the son], the boy was in. The leader of the gang who had been brought along, identified him as the one they were looking for. If the mother had had money, I’m certain the policemen wouldn’t have been averse to being bought off but as she had none, her pleas fell on deaf ears.

Wailing and asking to be arrested in his stead, she followed them to the Mile 3 park. None of them suspected anything other than perhaps a beating, followed by ‘bail’ which would no doubt end up in the policemen’s pockets.

None of the arrested men had any egunje to redeem himself. After debating among themselves, the policemen decided to do a burning. Each “thief” had petrol on him and a match was struck. I don’t think any of them knew of stop, drop and roll because my aunt painted a very vivid picture of people erupting in flames and running to try to put them out with more petrol being added liberally until the heat took its toll and they stopped struggling. Of course the poor mother went berserk and had to be restrained. The policemen just stood there laughing.

Take the case of the Anglican clergyman who was commuting between Aba and Eleme and got stopped by the police. When the policemen demanded a bribe, he calmly told them he was a clergyman and giving bribes wasn’t in accordance with this beliefs. He got shot and died. A bullet costs a lot more than the 20 naira the policeman wanted

An okada rider happened to overtake a police car in Port Harcourt and was pulled over. A policeman jumped out and ordered him to open his mouth. He complied. Sticking the barrel of his gun in the okada rider’s mouth, the trigger-happy policeman fired and ended another life.

Funny but sad world – the thieving politicians and law enforcement agents who deserve the naked parades and burning ten times over don’t get any. Well, that was how things were when I left. From what I hear, things aren’t really very different. Now I’m hearing via Chidi that our police have a new uniform.

Old wine in new bottles.

_________________________________________________________________________

Beckley weather’s been something else lately. I can’t believe it’s snowing right now (somewhere around three inches) when we’ve had weeks of sunshine.

I like to call myself an equalist (whatever that means). Some of my opinions are offensive to either sex — sometimes both. I intended at first to write about gender inequality as a whole but when I started out, I discovered I had more to write than would fit below the boring/length threshold of a blog post so I chopped up my article and am focusing on violence instead here. This is a collection of bits and pieces so you’ll have to bear with me if it doesn’t appear well thought out. That said, let’s begin with:

A slap.

It’s quite simple — ‘touch’ someone’s cheek with a lot of force. Something as simple as being the recipient or giver of a slap can serve as a delineating factor between a man and a woman, a boy and a girl.

“A man should never hit a woman,’ someone once told me. I don’t disagree with this statement and a lot of people don’t either. When I asked her about women hitting men she told me there were lots of situations when women are allowed to do so.

“I’ll slap the hell out of his lying/cheating ass” is a statement I hear and see in one form or the other and everyone cheers her on.

Why is there an outcry whenever a man slaps a woman and yet the society actively encourages women slapping men? Why do a lot of movies feature men taking slaps coolly but in the rare cases where the woman gets slapped she’s usually the weak one getting hit by the villain? Why does the society only term it ‘abuse’ when the man is doing the slapping but thinks of any man who reports being slapped as wimpy? I could go on and on and on but I think we should leave slapping alone and focus on:

The beating.

In November I read an article on the BBC website (Survey finds male abuse approval) and I must admit I was quite shocked. In this so-called age of enlightenment, when a lot of women agree that pushing, slapping, punching and kicking men is acceptable, something is definitely wrong somewhere. What’s even more sobering is another article (Drop-in for male victims of abuse) that puts statistics at 1 in 6 men likely to experience domestic violence. What’s worse, it would be considered unmanly to report them.

The Wikipedia article on spousal abuse says the figures for violence among both sexes are almost even although the severity is usually higher in most but not all cases involving male perpetrators (you may take this with a pinch of salt like most Wikipedia articles although this one is well-quoted).

Who is to blame for this? The society? I think this is just a phase. We saw it in the past with women being actively discouraged from reporting abuse and rape. It’s going to be harder to convince men to speak up because as the dominant sex of the human species, the society has still not come to terms with the fact that men can be, and are abused but choose to remain silent for fear of ridicule.

Perhaps we should glorify men slapping ‘evil’ women in the media to the same extent as we do the reverse. Better still, both sexes need to be dealt with fairly and in the same way for committing criminal acts of violence.

Before I come off as misogynist, I’d like to say I don’t condone violence towards anyone regardless of sex. What bothers me is that a lot of women use their being ‘fragile’ as leverage to do what wouldn’t otherwise be condoned if the roles were reversed. I chose not to discuss violence directed towards women by men as this has already been examined everywhere ad nauseam.

I’ve told you what I think. You may now crucify shoot me.

I know how much almost everyone (including yours truly) hates long posts, but I’m going to ask you to bear with me as I intend to post the last part of the bulk content in this post. We’re going to be discussing anonymous blogging, as well as pings and pingbacks. Grab some coffee or some other stimulant as you’ll be spending a while in terms of screen time.

Anonymous Blogging

If for some reason you know the risks of blogging about your workplace and still want to do so (like Mini-Microsoft) or simply want to open up and talk about yourself, revealing potentially embarrassing information, then anonymous blogging might be for you.

Anonymous blogging has been around for quite a while and the longest-lived anonymous bloggers have been those who take security very seriously. Bloggers like Zoe Margolis have found out the hard way what it means to be unmasked. You should be aware that if you’re paranoid enough to want to hide your identity, you should be aware that curiosity is a human trait and there are people paranoid enough to go to any lengths to track you down.

Here are some simple rules to follow:

1. Create a new identity

   Anything, however remote that can connect your anonymous and real personas should be eliminated. Build a new identity from scratch — birthday, name, email address, MySpace profile, ‘bio.’ Even your writing style can give you away. Just make sure you don’t develop a multiple personality disorder .

2. Use Misleading Information

   Throw in misleading pointers every now and then, especially when recounting an incident. Change locations and names but don’t lose yourself in the moment and give out information someone could piece together. Don’t worry about mixing up information — it tends to confuse anyone tracking you.

3. Use public terminals or blog by E-mail

   The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Some people ‘accidentally’ leak their identities just by having their IP addresses traced. I would recommend blogging from random public terminals (Cybercafés, libraries, etc). The second option, blogging via email (Blogger and WordPress both support this) is appealing. You still have to visit your blog [and other blogs!] to make comments and could still leak your identity this way.

   An alternative would be to use Tor on your home computer.

I haven’t exactly covered all the aspects of anonymous blogging. For the truly paranoid, there are two excellent articles at Global Voices and EFF.

At other times, you might maintain a ‘semi-anonymous’ blog which means friends and relatives are free to discover who you are, but you still don’t post your contact information. Just make sure you don’t give anything away, and be careful about what you blog. To minimize scrolling, the next section is on page 2.

Blogging Rules (Most of which I got off Jakob Nielsen’s Blog Usability Rules).

1. About Me and Photo

   Except you want to be anonymous, it’s usually a good idea to provide some information about yourself. People want to know who they’re dealing with. In the case of anonymous blogging, cooking up an obviously fictional biography is useful. People want to associate something with your online persona.

2. Titles

   Remember some people are going to be accessing your blog from a feed. If your titles are nondescript, there’s a chance that you’ll give the wrong impression. “You might like this” is not as informative as “Computer programmer joke.”

3. Links, links

   When making a post, you’ll need to create links pointing to another web page on the internet. The same guidelines for titles apply — “Biodun’s blog” is better than “click here.”

4. Classics

   Sometimes you make posts in a series or publish something you’d want visitors in the next four months to see. Your archives list all your posts, but you’d hardly expect someone who’s visiting your blog for the first time to hunt through your archives. Putting links to them in your sidebar make them more accessible. Examples would be Londonbuki‘s Mummy Monday Series and Uzo‘s Soundbyte!.

5. Categorizing / Labelling / Tagging

   Like titles, these have to reflect your content. Don’t try to label your posts with as many tags as possible. Use short, concise descriptions. When none of your categories closely matches your content, don’t be afraid to create a new one. For this blogging series, I had to create an articles category.

6. Publishing Frequency

   Almost every non-professional blogger breaks this rule. If you stick to a publishing schedule, your readers know what to expect. Although you might not publish all your content according to a schedule, you can make your readers expect certain posts at a certain time. Every Monday, I know to expect a post from Londonbuki‘s ‘Mummy Monday’ series. People like predictability.

   On the other hand, don’t make ten posts in a day and wait three months before making another ten. If you have a lot of posts to make, it’s a good idea to save them as drafts and publish them when you’re out of ideas.

7. Be discreet

   Even when you’re an anonymous blogger, respect people’s privacy — at the very least, use false names. Remember your content is readable by who has an internet connection. Potential employers can find stuff about you that could make them rethink hiring you.

8. Annoyances

   People want to read your content, not admire your site. If there’s anything obtrusive like popups, music and distracting animation (clocks seem to be the rave now), you might want to consider removing them. Music is my pet peeve — it’s very annoying to visit a site and be assailed by music. If you must put anything on your page, your visitor should be the one to decide to start or stop it. Embedded Youtube videos don’t automatically play for that reason.

9. Join the community

   Don’t be selfish. The blogosphere is an ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ universe. If you want visitors, you should visit other blogs sharing the same interests and leave comments. If you want people to link to you, link back to them. If people link to you, try to reciprocate. I’ll talk about why this is important when I discuss pinging in the next post. Popular bloggers like Keshi know the importance of reciprocating comments.

10. Specialize / know your audience

    I’ve been breaking this rule for so long. Don’t mix topics. Try to focus on one topic in a post if not in your entire blog. Juventus, Linux and Politics don’t go together — split a post into two topics if it contains two, three if it contains three. Knowing your audience enables you to know what to write, and specializing keeps you focused.

    An example would be my blog. Most of my readers are female, in the 18-35 age bracket and aren’t computer-inclined. Every time I make a post discussing code, I risk alienating everyone and have to quickly make a post discussing something else. I’ll be moving the code section to my development site and the writing section to my writing site.

11. Watch your formatting

    Fancy fonts and different colors might look cool in the editor you use when making a post, but what happens on your blog? If your template has a dark background, changing the color may not be in your readers’ best interests. Speaking from experience, people like me who’re visually challenged tend to develop an aversion to blogs with annoying formatting. I can’t read Taureanminx‘s sidebar, but I can read her posts, which isn’t too bad.

    Try to restrict your formatting to bold, italic, del and other basic tags. If you change your template from say, a white-backgrounded theme to a darker one, your dark blue formatting is going to throw readers off.

There are many more rules than this, but these are pretty basic. Follow the rules of netiquette and you should be good to go.

Advantages of Blogging

1. Unlike a forum, you own all the content on a blog. You have the right to decide what or what not to post. No moderators telling you what to do, no pesky admins (that doesn’t stop you from being one!).
2. It’s an art form — people get to know the real you from your blog. As you blog more, you’ll tend to attract people who think the way you do.
3. If you care about meeting people online, bloggers are generally more polite than people you’ll meet in chat rooms and on forums, although I’ve met a few nut jobs. Last month, I celebrated my birthday on the blogosphere and I got a lot more comments than I normally would on a normal day. Some people even sent me gifts from my Amazon wishlist.
4. You can actually generate traffic to another website of yours. Before I put up my blog, very few people contacted me to work on a website for them. Since I put one up, people frequently visit my web development and my writing sites.

Before you imagine blogging is a bed of roses, I’d like to point out a few problems you’re likely to encounter while blogging.

Problems

1. Comment spam

   This is perhaps the biggest problem bloggers face. According to Akismet, the top blog spam filtering service, statistics show that 93% of all blog comments is spam — unwanted messages, similar to e-mail spam. Spam is typically posted by automated software called bots run by advertising companies. It can get quite annoying to visit your blog and find you have 93 comments all advertising Viagra or diet pills.

   The most popular solution to this is to use an authentication image like the one I have on my blog.Visitors find it annoying to have to fill in additional stuff but it works. If you’re running WordPress, you can use a spam filter like Akismet

2. Stalking

   If you’re a parent, you might want to check out people your child meets with online. On the internet, emotions can be faked and anyone can pretend to be different. Some stalkers typically read blogs to find people they understand, then attempt to social engineer them — that is, impersonate someone they know, or get close to them by playing on their likes and dislikes. The New York Times has an article about the increasing number of rapes occurring as a result of people meeting online and agreeing to meet in real life. Basically, be careful about what you reveal about yourself online.

Again, there are a lot of problems you’re likely to meet, but I’ve put only the common ones here. This article is already too long, as it is. I hope everyone has learned a thing or two. In the next post in the series, we’ll explore advanced(?) stuff. I hope to do some consulting with my SEO expert, Afropinay before then.

Gosh, I’m tired!

Article Index

1. Part I — Introduction
2. Part 2 — Features
3. Part 3 — Blogging basics
4. Part 4 — Advantages of blogging and problems
5. Part 5 — Advanced Blogging
6. Part 6 — Conclusion

This part, and the next will deal with blogging proper. I’ll be using two popular blogging platforms — Automattic WordPress and Google Blogger. For this part, we’ll be discussing signup, making a post, commenting, and customizing your layout.

Here’s some terminology we’ll be using:

Post

A single message, entry or article on a blog.

Theme

Visual design for a blog.

Template

Same as theme. Sometimes a template is used to refer to the customization of a theme.

Signup

WordPress:

1. Visit the WordPress homepage and click Get a WordPress Blog now. You should get a very simple short form. Fill it out and agree to the terms

2. On the next screen you’ll have an option to choose the address of your blog. Unlike Blogger, you can’t change the address later, so choose carefully!

3. You should get an email after this. Follow the instructions (i.e. click the activation link). You should get a screen showing you your login information. It might be a good idea to login and change your password to something you can remember.

4. We’re done!

Screenshots

Blogger

1. Follow the instructions

2. Good luck!

Making a post

WordPress:

1. Click on Write on the top navigation.

2. Your title should be descriptive, as it’s what gets shown everywhere — from posts to feeds.

3. When you’re done making a post, WordPress allows you to group your posts by categories. You can add them directly using the box to the right. Each post can be in multiple categories.

4. Use the Publish button to get the post published. If you click save, you’ll keep it in draft form and it won’t show up on your home page.

Blogger

For some reason the default installation of blogger doesn’t show post titles by default. You’ll need to go to Settings, then Formatting and scroll down. Here’s a screenshot.

Follow the instructions for WordPress above. Instead of categories, Blogger groups your posts by labels. Separate each label with a comma. Here’s a screenshot:

Remember to Publish, not Save as Draft!

Commenting

The aim of almost every blog is to get feedback. Visitors to your blog leave comments or voice their opinions on posts you’ve made.

When people leave comments, it’s a good idea to reply the comments directly via a comment. Think of it as a discussion. In fact, that’s what comments are — discussions. Here’s a screenshot below from WordPress:

As a communication tool, the importance of comments cannot be overemphasized. Comments are usually a good measure of how popular a blog is with the most popular ones having close to 300 or more on each post (I’m not popular ). Leaving comments on other blogs and posting links to them from popular social services like Digg can make your blog known to other people in the blogosphere.

Customizing your Layout

What if all human beings looked the same? What if all blogs looked the same? Variety is key and being unique evokes a feeling of familiarity in your visitors.

If you’re not advanced you may not be able to create a whole new design for your blog (as I’ve done), although you can still make simple changes that set your blog apart from others. Changes need not be elegant — my friend Queenzy, using WordPress has done a little work with her WordPress theme, and voila she has a unique look. Even a little picture at the top, as Londonbuki has done, can work wonders. At least I know only one blog where I can see a bellybutton and a magazine in the same picture.

If you’re doing your own hosting, WordPress is a good choice. Deoluakinyemi, Gbenga and Xcomputerman all use WordPress, but their blogs don’t look anything like mine.

I have deliberately avoided discussing how to change a template or create one because the implementation is very different, depending on the blogging platform you’re using.

My next post deals with what happens next when you’ve started blogging. We’ll be discussing how to attract visitors, the basic rules you should follow, as well as what to watch out for and the problems you’re likely to face.

Article Index

1. Part I — Introduction
2. Part 2 — Features
3. Part 3 — Blogging basics
4. Part 4 — Advantages of blogging and problems
5. Part 5 — Advanced Blogging
6. Part 6 — Conclusion

Some of the common features which most blogs have include permalinks, two-way communication and syndication.

As the content of a blog’s home page is pretty dynamic, visitors to a blog need access to previous posts. The links to these posts are called permalinks — or permanent links — because theoretically they do not change.

The two-way comment system is basically a post and feedback system. When you make a post on your blog, visitors who’re interested in your topic usually leave comments on the site through a form or might link to a topic on your blog when making posts.

If you’re active in the blogosphere — as I am — you visit a lot of blogs everyday to check for new content and make comments. As the number of blogs you visit becomes larger, it becomes quite tedious. Most blogs syndicate, or offer an alternate format of their content called a feed. The two most common formats for syndication are Atom and RSS.

It’s a format which contains post titles and either excerpts or complete posts from a blog. As posts are made, the ‘feed’ gets updated. Using compatible software like Google Reader, Newsgator, Microsoft Outlook, or RSSBandit you can be kept updated on posts as they’re made and decide which ones to visit and comment on. People do not have to physically visit a blog to find out what content it has — usually, by looking at the titles in the feed, you can tell.

(Hint: if you’re using Internet Explorer 7 or any other browser, take a look at the address bar. You should see an icon like this if the blog has at least one feed).

The structure of most blogs is pretty much the same — a header, a sidebar and a content section with an optional footer. Typically, the header contains the blog title and description, the content section the posts, the sidebar contains links to other blogs (called a blogroll), and links to previous posts called archives. The footer contains copyright information. Click on the thumbnail to view a labelled profile of a blog, using mine as an example.

This is pretty rudimentary stuff for now. You may be wondering why you should blog. In my next post we’ll look at the advantages of blogging.

<spoiler>
<![CDATA[ Don't worry, o ye advanced bloggers (Vera take note!). When we get to Part 4 we'll discuss techniques and I'll be there to explain some stuff using Blogger and WordPress with lots of screenshots. We'll talk about pinging and XML-RPC, and some other mundane things. Never fear all ye ladies -- I won't 'geek-talk.' ]]>
</spoiler>

Article Index

1. Part I — Introduction
2. Part 2 — Features
3. Part 3 — Blogging basics
4. Part 4 — Advantages of blogging and problems
5. Part 5 — Advanced Blogging
6. Part 6 — Conclusion

I’ll spend the next few posts discussing blogs and hopefully educating us on the blogosphere and what makes it tick, using excerpts from my speech. [I'm only doing this because there's nothing interesting going on now].

While chatting with a friend online last week, he asked me, “I’d like to have a blog but I don’t know where to start.” When I asked him what he knew about blogging, he had no clue — he simply knew most of his classmates had one and didn’t want to be left out. He’s not the only one — I get a lot of questions like that from people who want to start blogging.

This presentation article is for those who don’t blog but are either curious about blogging, or have reservations about it. I’m going to be speaking informing you today about how to carve your own niche for yourself on the Internet through a blog.

We’re going to discuss blogs and blogging in general, the features of a blog, why you should blog, and the problems you’re likely to face while blogging.

Now, what is a blog?

The Encyclopaedia Britannica Online defines a blog or weblog as ‘an online journal where an individual, group, or corporation presents a record of activities.’

Blogs have been in existence since the beginning of the Internet — in fact, Tim Berners-Lee, often credited as the creator of the Internet, created what may have been the first blog.

At first, blogs were used by so-called computer geeks as a communication tool. Blogs evolved, the way computers, the Internet and email did so that you didn’t have to be tech-savvy to have one. It became as simple as login, type and post. Using services like Blogger and WordPress, one can be up and blogging in less than 20 minutes.

The blogosphere which is basically a subset of websites on the Internet has grown tremendously in the past decade. Technorati, a website dedicated to tracking blogs, as of October 2006 put the number of blogs tracked at over 57 million blogs, with over ten thousand getting started everyday, and the total number of blogs on the Internet doubling every 230 days. Of course this is hardly representative of the number of blogs that exist and estimates are as high as 100 million blogs.

If you’re not a blogger I’m sure you’re wondering what all the hype is about blogging and why blogging has replaced e-mail as the hottest fad among the young. According to The Baltimore Sun (the article has been deleted, but it’s available for a fee), among teenagers, blogging is a medium which teens have found helps them in asserting their identity, proclaiming their individuality or even rebelling. It’s not just teens who’ve been caught up by the fad — the owners of most of the blogs I read are between the ages of 20 and 30.

I’ve introduced you to what blogging is about. In my next post we’ll take a look at some of the features of a blog.

Article Index

1. Part I — Introduction
2. Part 2 — Features
3. Part 3 — Blogging basics
4. Part 4 — Advantages of blogging and problems
5. Part 5 — Advanced Blogging
6. Part 6 — Conclusion