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Articles
e-publication by John Lee After reading the above email, which was sent to a discussion group known as dhamma-list, I followed the link provided to the website. “It’s a wonderful project!” I thought to myself after reading the homepage. As I continued to read the rest of the website, I was over-whelmed by the idea. Immediately I created a link on my own Buddhist website to the SBS site and emailed to all my friends about it. It was the only the way I could think of to contribute to the effort, besides financially. I continued to follow the updates for the official launching and road shows. I was eager to witness the taking place of the biggest project in the history of Buddhism in Malaysia. One day I visited Sukhi Hotu, and met Chan Lai Fun who was then the Webmaster for SBS. She asked me whether I would be interested to help maintain the website. I agreed with mixed feelings of joy and reluctance, as I was still busy with my own academic project. Nevertheless, it is a meritorious deed. She showed me how it was done and with that, I took the task home. Working on SBS website was not a difficult task—at the beginning, at least. All I had to do was to copy and paste the materials sent to me by Lai Fun and Lim Lay Hoon from Taiping, arrange them appropriately to fit onto the screen and make sure that readers could find their way easily through the links. Credit should be given to Lai Fun and Ven. Kumara who maintained the site before me. However, as the webpages begin to grow in size and number to provide the latest news on SBS, the management of the site becomes a challenge. New programming technology has to be implemented in order to make the maintenance easier in the future. (John has to learn Perl, a programming language, for the purpose. —Ed.) SBS site is hosted at quantrum.com.my, which is jointly owned by Khong Wye Keen and Quek Jin Keat. Currently there is an average of close to 10 visitors to the site daily. Thanks to the many other web-masters who have set up links on their own websites pointing to the site. Being part of the Theravada Buddhism Web Ring, SBS site also has visitors from visitors of other Buddhist sites. The site provides information about the project and how we can do our bit to support it. There is a page for people to make their financial contributions. After depositing the money into the SBS project fund bank account, they can submit their particulars and transaction details through the website directly to the administrator. Just click on the link “Donation / Pledge Form”. The most updated section of the website is the “Unfoldment” page. This is where you can find out the day-to-day progress and happenings of SBS. It’s updated almost every half a month. Missed earlier issues of Sasanarakkha newsletter? No problem. All of them are available for downloading in portable document format (PDF). Some of the newsletter reports and articles are also directly readable on the site. Usually, if there’s anything new, I’ll either put a link to it from the homepage or sometimes even on the homepage itself. Visitors may then easily find and read the latest reports on what has happened and the latest announcements of what will happen. It’s a wonderful feeling working with other Buddhists towards a common goal, even though I have yet to meet most of them. Nevertheless, I can feel the closeness as everybody strives together to achieve it. Whenever I am working on the website, I wish more people would visit it and feel the joy in the joint-efforts towards this noble cause. SBS
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