Datu Jamal Ashley, the blogger

Jamal Ashley Abbas is a freelance writer since 1998, former columnist and Managing Editor of Mr. & Ms. Magazine, awardee of the prestigious Manila Rotary Club Journalism Awards in 2001,

He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Journalism Studies Association of the Philippines, Inc. (JSAP, Inc.) and the VP for Media & Communication of the Bangsa Moro Federal Business Council, Inc. (BFBCI).

He is a Media Studies specialist, former lecturer at the University of the Philippines’ College of Mass Communication (Communication Studies and Film Studies), Kalayaan College (Communication and Journalism) and Far Eastern University (Communication courses in both the undergraduate and graduate levels). He also taught Communication and English courses at the FEATI University.

He gives seminars / workshops on English, Communication, Media Studies and Film in various academic and professional venues.

He is a social media manager, taking care of several blogs and FB pages including his “flagship” blog, Postprandial Musings, 2.0 @ jamalashley.com.

He finished his M.A. in Media Studies (specialization: Film) from the country’s “national university”,  University of the Philippines (U.P.). He was the top of his class (GPA of 1.0) and won the Best M.A. Thesis of the College. [He also finished academic requirements for M.A. Journalism except for comprehensive exam and thesis.] He was also the President of the CMC Graduate Students’ Association for two years. He is the first Filipino to graduate with an M.A. Media Studies degree from U.P.

He did graduate studies in Business Economics —  Strategic Business Economics Program (SBEP), the flagship project of the University of Asia and the Pacific, a top Catholic institution known for its economic researches / studies.

His undergraduate degree is in Petroleum Engineering  (B.Sc. Pet. Eng.) from the top university in the Middle East. He is the first Filipino petroleum engineer. He did  his practicum at the Clausthal Institute of Technology in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany. He went on study tours in Germany, Mexico and Algeria.

He also has Diplome in French Language from Alliance Francaise. He attended classes in Paris and Manila.

He is a “’netizen”. He develops and maintain several websites and blogs in the World Wide Web. And he likes traveling. He has been to Brunei, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Algeria, U.S.A. and Mexico.

Jamal Ashley does academic, technical and journalistic writing. He writes for various publications and does editorial consultancy, proofreading, editing and ghostwriting. He is also a writing coach.

Blogging the Bangsa Moro,
the book of essays

Before blogging was invented or became popular, I created and maintained websites. I wrote just about everything but mostly about the Bangsa Moro (Moro Nation). I just used free webhosts like virtualave., geocities, 0moola, freehostia etc. I started around mid-90s. I did not see any other website about or by Moros during that time. To my surprise, I received quite a number of emails congratulating me on my websites and wishing me
the best. These emails came from abroad, and mostly from Christian Filipinos. These emails were the ones that inspired me to maintain and build other websites.

Creating websites was not very easy since that was even before the Front Page software was invented. I had to learn HTML, FTP, etc. But it was fun. Creating the websites with flashing lights and moving graphics (gifs) made for a lively website.

When I started in 1999 writing professionally for a newspaper, the Philippine Post, I uploaded my articles to my websites. I got even more positive response. One Fil-Am group asked permission to publish one of my articles, the Charge of the Wood Brigade, in their website.

Much later, I found out that my articles in those websites had been cited in various websites, including Wikipedia, and even in academic research studies. Some of my articles were archived by the websites of other institutions.

I was a late-comer to blogging. At first, I thought it was just an online diary. I could just write one article at a time. And the old entries would not be read anymore. There was nothing in a blog that I could not do with my websites.

It was only in 2005 that I started blogging, with Blogger or blogpost.com. Later, in January 2006, I used blogsome.com, a bloghost owned by an Irish company. I liked blogsome because it allowed the users to do anything with the templates, like putting apps, graphics, videos, etc. I was practically creating my own widgets. Later, I also used wordpress blogs.

I found out that somehow, the blogs are easily found by search engines, easier and faster than with websites. Perhaps it was because it was being “renewed” with every fresh entry. Every new entry seems to attract the search engines and ad platform
networks. On the other hand, adding new entry to websites doesn’t seem to register with the search engines. The various search engines and advertising networks like Technorati are crawling the web and ranking the sites using some criteria. Blogs receive much higher rankings than websites.
And so by 2007, I concentrated more on my blogs than on my websites. I used the tricks of the trade (now called SEO) to get good rankings in Google Rank, Technorati and others…