Monday Morning is the official student media body of National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. Ever since its inception in 2006, it has been serving as a vital link between student community and the administration by being the featured news feed for the students, professors, and alumni, about campus activities, department updates, recruitment information, SAC happenings, fest coverage, alumni news, weekly polls and interviews with the Director, Chief Warden, Professors, distinguished alumni and dignitaries, and exceptional students. The newsletter also does detailed reviews of the Halls of Residence and various other infrastructural entities in the NIT Rourkela campus such as the TIIR building, Biju Patnaik Central Library to name a few.. Primarily as a weekly e-newsletter with a one-page HTML template with an often asked question - "Does Monday Morning has more followers than members?", as stated by its first editors, Monday Morning has grown to be a full-fledged website with more than 10,000 peak page impressions in a week. Monday Morning launched its app on Google Play Store on 5 February 2017. As of May 2017, the app has received more than 700 downloads with an average rating of 4.9. The e-newsletter also has a YouTube channel, which showcases the various activities of NIT Rourkela. The newsletter has also actively participated in bringing about constructive changes in the institute.
Inception: 2006
Monday Morning dates back to 2006 and was founded by the then final year students – Shrinivas Ron and Chinmoy Mohapatra from the suggestion of the then director of NIT Rourkela, Dr Sunil Kumar Sarangi. Monday Morning started primarily as a newsletter site that got uploaded with the news cache for the week on every Sunday night, with the issue going live on Monday Morning. The team that initially consisted of reporters, photographers and technicians started inducting cartoonists in 2012 as well. Kushal Tibrewal is credited for that. The selection of the team is done through an induction procedure during the last week of March and is open to all first-year students. The coming batches kept improving the website further with the addition of newer sections. The summer of 2010 saw a whole new website coming up, one that called associations with "Monday morning blues". Next summer, Monday Morning went for a sleeker, professional news website, and there was an immediate explosion in sections and news volume.
Project Adamantium: 2015
With a beta website in 2010, which even though got better with the advent of Joomla, Team Monday Morning was constantly trying to bring in new changes, raise more critical issues, changed the course of things and produced impactful content. The Joomla-based MM website was definitely decent and easy to manage, but it was very slow and had dated interface. Furthermore, with the world leaning towards a more mobile-based internet browsing, the website needed to be very responsive. In 2015, Monday Morning decided to collaborate with Microsoft Campus Club, one of the leading technical club of the institute, to develop a new website. The website would be fast, responsive and have a modern and intuitive interface. The project was code-named "" by owing to his fondness of Marvel Cinematic Universe where adamantium is a strong, indestructible metal. As of March 2017, the developers have made over 1 million addition of lines of codes to the code. , the project lead and lead developer of says, "It was a pretty hectic task. I was supposed to work on this throughout the summer, but I couldn’t do that because of the Nepal earthquake. So, I only started working during the last two weeks of the vacation, on a tight deadline."
Project Vibranium: 2017
With the success of and advent of the new and a much responsive website, phase one of using technology advancement in achieving readership was complete and Monday Morning started working on the mobile application which could be used on Android platforms. The project was code-named "" following the convention of naming a project after metals or alloys in fictional Marvel Cinematic Universe. The team maintained their workflow using GitHub as they shared their resources and progress using the repository. Using Java for the logic part and XML for the design part, the working of the app was made simple. For this purpose, they built an API using PHP, which generates a response in JSON format and decided to introduce caching at the client side device to increase the speed of the app. The app was supposed to be multi-layered, unlike the traditional single layer android apps. The team introduced two tabs in the app along with the floating button to access the nested tabs to accommodate the sub-categories of every section.
