Assalamu Alaikum / Hello,

It’s been a looong time since I posted on this blog  - been very very busy!

I’d just like to say I won’t be posting anything on the blog for a long time and email response will be very slow. I’m going to book myself a 2 week holiday for the end of Ramadhan in order to get all my coding done… unfortunately, this site is not my immediate priority at the moment, so I don’t know when I’ll get to finishing off the new site.

Ramadhan Mubarak everyone.

Some of my friends helped out with a charity called Facing Africa back in 2009 so I thought I’d promote the BBC documentary about the particularly gruesome disease Noma for the 2010 project:

BBC TWO this Wednesday 9th June at 9pm

I can’t seem to find time to do anything these days. I recently got a new job alhamdullilah and it’s taking time out of my usual pattern. I’ll post a bulk collection of the stories I’ve bookmarked soon inshallah.

As for the new design of the Islamic Dictionary site, well, I’ve hit a technical speed bump and need to do quite a bit more reading into Drupal before I can complete the new search algorithm, create an auto-generated glossary and keep the SEO up. The chances are the new design and system will be up next month. Someone suggested that I should use Joomla but I doubt that it’ll make a big difference.

Oh, and sorry for the email contacts sent via this site. I haven’t been able to answer all my personal emails let alone the ones for this site.

Assalamu Alaikum Brothers and Sisters.

If you were expecting the site to be updated to a new design at the end of January then I’m very sorry but that’s not happened. Quite a few things have come up lately that have made this site take a back seat in my priorities.

Don’t expect a full working version this month either. I should have an alpha version ready near the end of this month (February) and this will be open for private preview to some of my email correspondents.

If all goes well then the new design, which will probably be based on a very different template than the one mentioned before, will be up in March.

If anyone has some good advice, tips and modules for drupal, or any tips for the website in general that they want to share with me then please leave a comment. Thanks.

You can donate to dec.org.uk or your favourite charity. May God help them.

Salam/Hello.

Seasons Greetings and a happy new year to non-Muslims. Condolences to the Muslims on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Hussain (AS) on Ashura.

I’m getting sick of looking at the design of this website so I’m going to be redesigning it and changing its underlying infrastructure from a bespoke system to Drupal. This will happen some time in January inshallah. Any tips and advice are welcome - what do you guys want to see on this website? What new sections and features do you want to see?

I’m thinking of modifying this theme: http://drupal.org/project/easybreeze

What do you guys think?

Another thing I’m planning on doing is changing the subject matter of this blog. Instead of news reports I’m going to share hadiths and parables - so no more horrible stories of Muslims doing bombings and dumb things.

I might also be changing server along the road because my plans for the site will use up quite a bit more bandwidth and file space. I’ve got a place to host it so nobody try to sell me hosting, thanks.

The day the attacks occurred there was a sudden spike in the number of people searching for ‘Allahu Akbar’ meaning on the islamic-dictionary.com site, making it become the second most searched word for that one day, then everything went back to normal in the next few days. It’s quite wierd that the spike didn’t have an ascension phase, a plateau at the peak and then a steady decline. It was literally a spike /\.

One of my favourite websites, The American Muslim, released this extremely long article (tl;dr) and it does a far better job then I ever would talking about it or pasting from a news website:

Fort Hood Tragedy, Islam, and America

by Sheila Musaji

First I must say that as a Muslim, as an American, and as a human being - I cannot understand how anyone can commit such an act.  The “fact” that Maj. Hasan was a Muslim and so am I does not give me any understanding of his action - the fact that we are both Americans does not give me any understanding of his action - the fact that we are both human beings does not give me any understanding of his action.  The shooting at Fort Hood was a criminal act.  A person who could do such a thing is either mentally unbalanced, a sociopath, or a psycopath.  With the information we have so far there is no way to tell what category Maj. Hasan falls under… Click here to continue reading.

May you have a wonderful Eid

Just two small notices:

• Make sure to check where your dates come from before buying them since they could have been produced in Israel (Occupied Palestine).
• If you notice any errors on the website then please contact me explaining what happened and the error you saw.