This thread was an absolute disgrace. The simplest rule of civil debate is, be civil. If this recurs, then there will be – for the first time ever on this blog – disciplinary action.
Latest Updates: meta RSS
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Admin
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Admin
Voting for the 7th Annual Brass Crescent Awards is now open! VOTE AT http://brasscrescent.org until November 27th!
(Regretfully, Talk Islam is ineligible – despite the fact its a group labor of love, being nominated would still have had the appearance of impropriety).
UPDATE – you can follow the Brass Crescent Awards on Twitter (@brasscrescent) or on Facebook!
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Admin
A brief note about site policy…
All authors have the ability to edit their own posts and moderate comments on their threads – but not anyone else’s. That means, for example, that johnpi can edit comments by others attached to his post, but not comments on a post by Buzz or shams. This means, effectively, that all authors are responsible for maintaining their own threads.
As in all things, there is balance. That balance between taking a heavy hand or laissez faire is, I think, up to the judgement of each author. Thats something that each of us who leaves comments also has to take into account.
The obvious rule is simple: don’t interact with someone you have issues with. That means don’t comment on their posts; it means not replying to them in someone else’s thread.
Note – admins like myself, Willow and Thabet are empowered to edit comments on anyone’s thread. They will intervene in the worst offenders (takfiris, obscenity, etc).
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aziz
Vacation is over! I am (headed) home. Hanging out in Dubai for a bit until my flight to ATL tonight, then connecting to ORD and driving home to Madison Sunday afternoon. Just thought I’d check in and wave. *wave*
so, what did I miss? checking email… 683 messages… *faints*
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Admin
We now have Qur’an Tweets on the sidebar. sort of obvious, but worth mentioning anyway
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johnpi
Teh awesome blog post of the day: How to gain a following and potentially win a Brass Crescent Award.
I am vaguely calling you out
Bowers writes:
This is a message for all you Chicken Littles, you handwringers, you wannabe strategists, you people who have suggestions or doubts: I am vaguely calling you out.Who you are is not really important. Why I am vaguely calling you out is also not important. In fact, it is better that both “you,” and what you are doing, are never really defined. This has three advantages:
First, it’s easy. As long as both you and your actions stay open-ended and amorphous, you can potentially be as many people I don’t like as possible without actually being anyone at all. This way, I win a huge argument with a lot of people, without actually engaging in an argument with anyone at all.
Second, it allows as many people as possible to identify with me calling you out. Everyone is angry at something someone wrote on the Internets, so the emotional need to call someone out on the Internets is widespread. When someone reads and recommends this diary, they can also join in the please of vaguely calling someone out for doing something. Now, I have a following.
Third, it prevents me from ever having to justify my calling you out. If I was specific in who I was calling out, it is possible that their written record would contradict my vague reasons for doing so. That would suck, so I am not taking any chances. This way, I can never lose.
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Admin
I thought this would be of interest to everyone (click to enlarge):
TalkIslam.info traffic May 2008 - July 2009
You can download the raw traffic data in excel format if you like. The sole reason for this success and steady growth is because of all of you. This is our site and our community and I think we all have every reason to take real pride in what we have built here together.
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Admin
We have a dedicated Journal for book reviews, Read Islam – as yet unused, but if anyone would like to post a book review there please reply so you can be given access. It will be a very nice, focused forum for discussion once we get some critical mass. If you have any reviews you’ve already written and are not averse to reposting there for a jump start, please let us know!
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Admin
FYI – register your Talk Islam email address at Gravatar.com and choose an avatar! Why just be an anonymous geometrical tile?
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Admin
If anyone has any experience with PHP and wordpress hacking, I could use some help and advice – need to integrate Peter’s Anti-Spam and AJAX Subscribe to Comments plugins into the P2 theme. drop me an email at salaam at talkislam dot info!
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Admin
the big post title problem is fixed, btw – was a simple setting in the admin panel
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Admin
Well, I think I have most of the tweaks in place. we still are lacking the cool search and the folksonomy tagging, but that will have to wait till tomorrow.
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willow
This is just me playing with the new design. La la.
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Admin
You may have noticed a major change in the site design by now
This is a test of the P2 theme for wordpress, which is a direct successor to the Prologue theme we were using earlier. I havent edited the theme for our color scheme yet but will do so shortly. I would like your feedback on whether this theme is better/worse than the old one. Some of the advantages are tag autocompletion in the post box, and the ability to show/hide comment threads on the main page. Also, comment pages support threaded comments, which is a really cool thing.
Please let me know if these new features are worth the change or not.
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johnpi
The antithesis of “blog outreach”: A movement is afoot for newspapers to again start charging for online content. Elsewhere, an article with the home page title of “I’m the reason so many newspapers are dying” says bloggers “are essentially parasites,” which assumes that bloggers bring nothing of value to the newspapers. Pardon my petulance but fine, I’ll just take my Google link-love elsewhere when the pay wall goes up.
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Admin
incidentally, sometime last night Talk Islam broke the 100,000 pageview threshold. Mubarak to all!
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Admin
I am excited to see that the Wordpress Gods will shortly release P2, the successor theme to Prologue (which is what we use here on TalkIslam, albeit heavily modified). Some of teh cooler features include tag auto-completion from the quickpost box, and the ability to show/hide threaded comments right on the front page. This is going to be a fun upgrade.
Check out the P2 demo here. It will also be available to Journals as well.
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aziz
I’m in SFO for a few days. Anyone out here?
apropos of nothing, Beliefnet has a nice gallery of Rumi quotes.
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Admin
Folksonomy is back! you will notice that each post page has a “Tag this post” form just above the comments section. Please use this to add tags to each post freely as you see fit. I disabled this earlier because of spam but now only registered users can add tags, so we can try this again. Please do use the feature liberally as every tag adds value, search relevance, and navigation benefits to the site overall!
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Admin
Wanted: suggestions for a linkroll (not a blogroll) for Talk Islam. Ideally, websites on the linkroll would promote Islam in the sense of religious tolerance and freedom, provide views into its diversity, and provide reference material to those looking for more information. explicit Dawah sites are not desirable, nor are blogs per se (we can add those to Planet Islam instead). Please leave your suggestions in thread!
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willow
Interesting new user journal. Worth a read.
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Admin
improve Talk Islam! Please leave your suggestions, concerns, comments, etc – about anything, be it site design, front pagers, etiquette, rules of thumb, whatever you want. This is our forum so lets make it work for us.
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Admin
I am about to upgrade the site to the latest version of wordpress. The site might be unavailable for a minute at most if all goes well, or two if it doesnt (and I need to undo the upgrade). Hold tight…
UPDATE: all done! Please email the admin (salaam at talkislam dot info) if you observe any weirdness whatsoever.
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Admin
Did you know that if you have access to the front page, you can automatically create a Journal? Just click the Create link on the sidebar. A Journal is a fully-featured Wordpress blog, and when you write a post in your Journal it automatically appears in the Journals sidebar (scroll down a bit) This means that Journal posts get a lot more exposure than posts on the front page.
If you arent a contributor to the main page, but are a regular reader, you can still sign up for a journal. Just email the admin (see the Request link below) or leave a comment here and we can do the needful.
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Admin
salaams all – we need to refresh the Planet Islam project. Please leave links to feeds to add to the site (please give feed addresses in addition to blog URL). The more the merrier! I’ll be using this post as a reference so anytime you think of a new blog to add to the Planet, leave it here.
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Admin
It’s time to retire the “straight up killers” meme, regardless if it is intended as critique or sarcasm. Likewise, insinuating that someone’s Deen is inferior to someone else’s borders on takfir and will not be permitted here.
Genuine disagreements about religious priorities are great. Using them as cudgels on each other is not.
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willow
I’m going off the grid until Monday night–no computers, no cell phones, just a chilly little island in the San Juans and hopefully some killer whales. Save some of the good bits of the dawah bus debate until I get back.
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aziz
“Well, I’m back.” — Sam Gamgee
It is very hard to visit Africa. It is even harder to leave. Not just because flights get delayed and what not… Africa stays with you. And i have a feeling that I have some posts to make at my blog that are not going to sit well with a lot of my regular readers because of it.
I am thankful to be home and thankful to have had the opportunity to go. I also missed the lot of you
For now though i have a lot of inbox clearing,bill paying, and whatnot to do.Did I miss any good arguments while I was gone?
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Admin
reminder – please tag your posts! Use as many tags as you think appropriate. Tags are how we get Google to love us, and you know how high-maintenance the big G is…
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aziz
Reminder – voting has begun in the Brass Crescent Awards!
Also, go vote for Talk Islam here, while you’re at it. Please?
