KnowledgeOman.com's behind the scenes

"KnowledgeOman.com's behind the scenes" is a weekly series that will be published every Saturday on this Blog.
Since I am an active member of the KnowledgeOman.com (KO) executive team and a contributor of KO's Home Page Articles and since KO updates its Home Page every Saturday, I will be giving you the latest scoops on the work that goes into creating KO's content and some other related materials on this Blog every Saturday so you can look into how KO really works.

In this week's behind the scenes we are going to start with the first column that you see when you first enter the Home Page which is about the 'Show Your Potential' initiative by Microsoft (MS). For you who don't know, KO and MS have joined hand to come up with a program to help people pass Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) and Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) exams all for free. Read the article in KO to know more about it.
Anyway, we finally are starting the workshops and if have already joined the program, you should have already received an email by today.
A lot of work went into organizing this workshop and a lot have things had to be agreed on in order to get the newsletter out. Unfortunately, I can not reveal anything more than that. Just make sure you attend the workshop on the date specified.

My segment on KO, which is 'CityTalks', is for a good cause this week. I talk about a learning center for children with mental diseases and retardation. I interviewed the Directing Manager, Mr. Kawthar Al Hathrami, of the center and it is all caught on video.
I personally really felt for the woman who is doing this all for a good cause and she is getting no support from the government just because she is a "private" institution and the public is not much helpful even.
I paid her a visit at the center last Tuesday at Al Khuwair (Creative Learning Center) and she kindly gave me a tour of the place after the end of the interview. I was not able, however, to get an interview with any of the parents or the children partly because the center is during its holidays at the moment and also because the parents tend to get a little Private about things like this which is understandable.
All went well until I was able to get a hold of a woman who was willing to have an interview with me and we agreed on meeting up on Friday. Keep in mind that the video has to be ready on Friday in order for us to publish at midnight. It didn't matter because the woman canceled at the last moment and I quickly started editing the video.
It usually takes me a couple of days to edit a video but yesterday, I had less than half a day to do it, not to mention how hard it is to upload a video with our Internet speeds.
Luckily, I was able to finish the video, upload it and write a short article on the topic all before the deadline.

The 'Knowledge Lebre' which is managed by Qusai Al Shidi was done on time and was created perfectly. Actually, the article was ready since Wednesday which was great. We should all follow this guy's lead because this is how things should be done.

The 'Product Review' segment which is managed by Tommy Bosco, AKA KUBU, was pretty much the opposite if the 'Knowledge Lebre' segment. It was already 11pm and nobody was bale to get in touch with him. He was no where to be found. Until about 12am and that's when we were finally able to find him. He started writing his article at the time and took him about 20 minutes to do so.
I had a look at his article and it looks great. I don't believe it only took this guy 20 minutes to create it all. I am sure he had his reasons for not being on time but things like these always happen. I am just glad that the article turned out to be great.

You see, how we publish our content is first, we post it in a test forum which nobody other than us have access to then, when we are all ready, the moderator just pushes the publish bottom and adds them all to the front page.
Now, there is a problem with this system. I like the whole idea but, we want whoever to publish an article, to publish it under their own names which means, I couldn't publish an article for KUBU because it is going to be published under my name. So, everyone publishes their article under their own name. Another thing is, we want the Home Page segment to be in a certain order.
So where is the problem? Well, with VBullitine (the software that we are using for KO) when you publish an article in a forum, the latest article will be on top and the earlier ones will be under and there is no way to manipulate that. We can organize things on our own and we can only work the way the system wants us. So we have to make KUBU publish first, Qusai second then me and finally Mohammed. And so, if KUBU is not around, we all can't publish.
We are still trying to figure out a better way to fix this problem. If you have any suggestions, please go ahead.

That's it for this week. Please come back for more in next week's issue.