I was interviewed by the BBC’s FiveLive station to talk about toot. Read and listen here.

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..

This week has been amazing. Things have come together in a really good way. I have not been as excited about a project in the past few years as I’ve been this week. What is great is that with a small of really good people, we have been able to build this site from scratch in a relatively short time. What started as a little prelaunch experiment has evolved into something which we feel is promising.

We still have to go through a proper selection of sites that we want to feature. What we have now is by no means the final list. But just the thought of being able to bring together the posts of diverse, interesting and engaged bloggers from ‘Arabia and beyond’ on toot is very exciting. Add to that that toot visitors will be able to give votes to bloggers they like, is adding to the site a democratic aspect that we find fitting.

Tonight, most of the toot team, Karim, George, Wael, Jad and myslef, was in the office. A big thank you to Jad, who over the past two days (and over the past few weeks in general) worked hard to pull our ‘pre-alpha’ site together. And another thank you goes to Wael, for translating our ideas and initial prototypes into this good looking design (at least we think so :).

I think we reached a milestone today.. Let the harvest begin!

Just tested a prtototype of toot on my wife Salua. It took just 10 minutes of watching her using the prototype to discover a number of problems with the design. Watching somone not involved in the development of a site use it is a humbling exprerience. Stuff that is ‘just obvious’ turns out to be very unclear. It’s really the best way to improve usability. A bug list is coming dear development team!!