Wow, the launch date is here! We have been so excited and anticipative this past month for this day to finally come.

Toot came about as we witnessed something amazing stirring across Arabia and all around the world- a phenomenon known as blogging, whether it is sharing knowledge, pictures, opinions, or emotions. Intelligent, passionate, interesting, funny, knowledgeable and courageous people were starting to use the web to make their voices heard!

We became excited and decided to build a new medium in which intelligent voices from and for Arabia are brought together and presented to a wider community; where hungry readers and passionate writers can share and communicate without filtering.

In the past few years, blogs have turned into archives of human thought. Blogging is not passive news consumption- it is appealing because it is personal. Blogs are instilled with the temper of their writer, and this personal touch is much more in tune with our contemporary sensibility than was the dogmatic media of old.

All this represents something new: participatory media- fostering real connections based on trust, respect, and creativity. So, of course we are excited!

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Happy toot year!

Without going into the detail of what happened, something in toot’s code was broken. Now, I’m no programmer, but maybe a can, sometimes, sort of, think like one. The only programming language I ‘mastered’ was BASIC, and that was around, what? 1985..

Of course, over the past 10 years I got interested in stuff like php, and Javascript.. But I never really learned any of those languages. No time, man!

Anyway. Yesterday, this code problem was driving us all mad. Deep down inside I felt there must be a simple solution to it. But it was a nightmarish feeling: knowing that you can reach somewhere but feeling unable to move to that point. In this case it was my lack of actual coding knowledge. I went home in a depressed state.

But I did not give up. Sitting alone after everyone went to sleep, I started browsing the net looking for Javascripts and some info. I found a number of scripts, some large and complex, some really simple (which even I could understand). I took the simplest script, then started playing around with some scripts that come with Dreamweaver. I started hacking the scripts. I combined some stuff. Trial and error. Little steps. Reload. Reload. Reload.

Then at around 1 am it finally clicked. A solution for part of our problem was there.

But with the deadline for the launch looming, what i ‘created’ still was not THE solution. So today I was anxious to talk to Jad about what I created. In the evening we were on the phone, me at home and him at the office. He was about to try out something totally new to solve that damn problem. But I convinced him to try something.

Over the next 10 or 15 minutes we started hacking together my solution with part of what we had already.. Reload. And BOOM it worked. It felt GREAT.

In the larger context of things, what we did was not something major. We did not invent a rocket. It might still turn out that the ’solution’ needs a lot of refinement. But I felt satisfied to have followed my gut feeling and arriving at exactly the soultion I had in my mind. The moral of the story: simplify, hack, test, retry, reload!

the site is closed.. the old index has been taken down. the new page is being built. the tootlog is at blog.itoot.net. Let’s just see if posting works..

Had a long and tiring and amazingly productive week on several fronts, so a bit syrupy here. Need to go to sleep, but couldn’t help check a few blogs out there from our parts. Amazing stuff being produced by Arab bloggers. What a wonderful thing that people are able to just describe their lives thoughts and feelings. I think it’s a profound thing that’ll blossom in an intellectually confident and independent minded ethos. Very powerful times…

Every time I pause, step out of the picture, and study the Arab blogosphere, I find myself amused at how quickly and dynamically it is changing and growing. It is even more amusing to scratch the surface and look at it a little deeper- you can clearly see distinctive borders of the different Arab countries sketched on the internet, with their respective mentalities, interests, and correlations.

Most of the countries have formed their own little blogging communities, and perhaps even built walls around these regional communities. To my knowledge, toot will be the first attempt to bridge the Arab blogosphere as whole, beyond traditional formats and the shackles of time and space; bridging a community of Arabs with a passion for sharing.

Needless to say, I’m really excited at the prospects.

To make things even more exciting, although I’ve met all the toot team on random occasions before, today was my first “full-toot-team” event. Even Mazen all the way in London made an appearance(as you can see on Karim’s laptop screen)!