New site, new ideas
Dear readers, as my blog at MeJournals begins to gather some steam and increased viewership, I think it’s time to migrate my blog to WordPress proper.
MeJournals was an idea hatched by some of my good old friends in high school (Timothy and Jo Fan) at the peak of the blogosphere fandom back in 2009. They co-created MeJournals, which runs on WordPress, to promote good writing and sharing of ideas as the internet age was fast approaching. While being part the MeJournals community I had my own small personal blog for years, followed by a long period of silence, and then in late 2014 I came up with my own idea to write about dentistry. I initially wanted to start a WordPress proper blog, but I thought for convenience sake I’d just run with the old mejournals.com/kai URL for a trial run to see whether a dental blog can be informative and awesome at the same time.
Turns out it’s doing great, especially when I write clickbait-worthy posts and essential information posts with memes. MeJournals while great at being an icebreaker question “What is Mejournals? Is it another blogspot site?”; does have its shortcomings. It’s being hosted in Malaysia, and based on my stats it appears my viewers come from all over the globe. Personally I’ve tried accessing the site from UK and it’s a little slow. Themes are also getting a bit outdated as I intend to make the site look a bit more modern. I think Timothy might be a little too busy to update the MeJournals platform at this time.
MeJournals was born as an idea to improve the blogging community. However it seems that these days people are less appreciative of long write-ups, and prefer attention-grabbing short bursts of information i.e. social media. I may go as far as to say that blogging is a dying art. It’s fast becoming the newspapers of the internet. And yet I am blogging because the stuff I want to write and convey to the world needs to be written in this form – with images, videos, memes in between the words. MeJournals has helped me achieve that, and for that I am grateful to my friends who created MeJournals: massive shoutout to Timothy and Jo Fan!
I published a thing!
Back in the summer of 2016 I worked on research project at Queen’s University Belfast on root canal treatments. It was a retrospective study on the quality of root canal treatments performed by undergraduate students at the university. Back then I did not divulge into the results of the study as it was unpublished work.
Choosing to publish in a renowned journal was tiring: there was edit after edit, meeting after meeting. Eventually in June 2017 our submission was accepted by the International Endodontic Journal! It took almost a year to get from results to publication, but the effort was worth it in the end.
Thank you Omid for your company and motivation from start to finish, and for insisting that I be named lead author! 🙂 Thanks also to the awesome lecturers in Belfast – Dr El Karim, Dr Lappin and Dr Killough.
You can find the online abstract on PubMed and on Wiley Online Library. As much as I want the whole paper to be available online for free, alas it’s the publisher’s decision to make it a paid service. However as an author I have the pdf file so if any of you readers are keen to read the paper, you can contact me. A word of warning: you may fall asleep reading it, it’s not the most exciting piece of work to read! Or better, if you have trouble falling asleep…
As part of a new signoff routine,
Kai
KAI DENTAL 