Author: Sabour Al-Kandari

Asalaamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatu,

OPEN THREAD! This means you comment, we read, you comment again, and we either pick a fight or learn something.

Reading week is upon us! Of course, it goes without saying that any sort of reading is blasphemy for the next 10 days, but since this isn’t school work, it seems like a great time to get a lot of website news up to date.

First, as you may have noticed, I’ve been playing around with the colours and added a winter effect. I’m a newbie photoshopper so just to let you guys know these things aren’t difficult if you try them, it doesn’t take much skill to google/youtube a quick lesson for what you want and implement it. Anywhoo the idea is to have some colour and thematic changes corresponding to stuff that’s actually happening, like for example the snow effect came on snow day, and something like a student NOT reading would correspond to reading week =).  Constant updates like that sort of give the feel that this website is still alive, and that I haven’t spontaneously fluctuated into another dimension, at least not yet anyway. This is where you guys come in, what do you think of the plan? Do you have any sort of cool effects or days in mind? Do you think such updates are better to be more frequent or less frequent? I didn’t want to make this into a poll because I need a little bit more detailed feedback.

Speaking of polls, can someone please look to the right and tell me WHAT is going on? Over half of our people are officially giving their school progress a death sentence. This is not cool guys, it’s a bit alarming if such a large amount of us aren’t feeling hype for school. Yes I know the education system sucks, but there still are ways to make the most of it. I wrote an article a few weeks back about doing better in school in case you missed it. Obviously that’s not really going to do much, but the point is to start a dialogue and get people to thinking that maybe it’s possible to really enjoy school. Drop a comment, especially if you voted (which all of you should if you’re on the website). What’s wrong? How are we going to fix this? Is there anything the MSA can do?

Another thing on the technical side is I’m thinking about integrating facebook comments on the website. This is really just a thought at this point and I have a bit of research to do, but I think it might encourage people to comment and *share* articles with their friends more. For some reason people are not too keen on commenting or *sharing*, they think you need a log-in account (you don’t need ANYTHING), and some feel overly-formal when writing. I want people to feel a part of a community on this website, but there’s no “u” in “community” at this point – oh wait there it is, err you get what I mean.

Also, we’re in need of blog submissions, so start cracking. If you have something interesting to share, write it, send it in, and as most of the authors have noticed I do give feedback and help throughout the process. Your brothers and sisters will benefit, you can tell your parents you’re a published writer, and they in turn will exaggerate further and tell their friends over dinner that you’re a best-selling author. I haven’t personally written as much as I’d like to, so I’d like to know what type of articles and categories are you interested in reading?

Oh yeah, this is a reading week thread too. Some of us have had our tests before and some will have it after insh’Allah.  10 days is a really long time guys, there’s a lot of potential to get some really beneficial stuff done (both Deen and dunya) and also have a ton of fun, so what do you have planned? Maybe your ideas will serve as encouragement for the benefit of others insh’Allah.