Chris Muir tells me that every time I link to him, you folks click in large numbers. I may not be Instapundit, but dammit, I have a great crowd here.

And it’s fundraiser time again. Chris supports himself by these donations, and keeps Day by Day coming. It’s a worthy cause. Toss a few bucks his way. He definitely deserves it.

And oh yeah, Chris? Some of us want Zed hotness. I mean, what use is Sam hotness to straight women?

Omri is at the Nefesh b’Nefesh blogger’s conference I couldn’t get to due to tiny little things like closing on my new home. He’s liveblogging it.

Netanyahu speaks:

18:51 - Bibi asserts that the Israeli government needs better public diplomacy - and that this can be done in part through a reasonably written daily blog. This is true. He also asserts that pro-Israel advocates can counter smears and fabrications with “just the truth” and that facts will defeat smears even if they remain “un-embellished.” This is false.

And the earlier liveblogging:

18:03 - Some woman just told Judith and I to “shush.” Despite my strong urging, Judith refuses to “yank that nobody’s hair and scream ‘do you know who I am’” Oh well.

Yes, Omri does tend to egg people on like that. He wouldn’t stop talking at my bat mitzvah about how one of my friends was a witch.

There’s a live webcast. Go look. Bibi’s speaking now.

Come back, Ilyka. Come back.

I have no one else to hang with while tweaking the boys on feminist issues.

The Carnival of the Jews is ready for you, Mr. DeMille.

Our very own Soccer Dad is hosting Haveil Havalim, a.k.a. Carnival of the Jews.

If you like this blog, you’ll like the posts in the carnival. Go check it out.

This week’s Carnival of the Jews, in two parts. One. Two. Why two? Why not?

I found a new blog today, the Bookworm Room. It is blogrolled. Check it out: Israel, politics, books, and dogs. I think Harrison would like this blog a lot.

Come to think of it, use the comments here to recommend blogs that I may not have read yet. Time to add some to the blogroll.

Who? Well, if you have to ask, you weren’t here back in the bleginning. Er, beginning of blogs.

Welcome back, Doc.

Damian decided that I need to tell my readers six more things about me. It’s a meme. You’re supposed to tell six unimportant things about yourself or your habits, then tag six more people. Yeah, the tag stops here, unless Soccerdad and Snoopy want to go on with it. And maybe Omri. Oh, and Rahel, Judith, and Lair. What the heck.

1. I will frequently drive long periods of time without listening to the radio or music, and not get bored. I like to think, or work on my novel in my head, or just plain daydream. I guess I’ve never had a difficult time being alone with my thoughts. I know that drives some people absolutely batty, but I’m not one of them.

2. I did not eat broccoli until I was in my thirties. Now it’s one of my favorite vegetables.

3. One of my first jobs was washing dogs in a grooming shop.

4. I used to play Photon (the precursor to Laser Tag) obsessively. I was on a team, played every spare day of the week, spent tons of money on it, and even flew to Dallas with my team to play Photon in the place where it was born.

5. I drove a forklift when I was 13 years old. And crashed it into a wall. Didn’t hurt the forklift or myself, but I left a scar on the wall.

6. Showering is essentially a ritual. I start the same way almost every time, wash in the same order almost every time, and get confused if I skip a step or do something differently. Hair first, feet last. That’s just the way it is.

There you have it. Six things you never wanted to know about me.

I recently commented on the closing arguments of the Enderlin/Karsenty case in France. Based on the information I had, I questioned how France 2 could have alleged that King Hussein visited Jamal al-Dura. After checking back with my source, he figured that he had been mis-informed about the incident. So I shouldn’t have gone ahead with writing what I did, as it was so outlandish, I should have waited for confirmation. My mistake.

Your thoughts and prayers are needed for a friend down under.

Tim’s always been a friend to me. My thoughts are with you, and I’ll try to remember you for the official Refuah Shlema on Shabbat as well.

I rarely send you folks over to give people money, but Chris Muir, the creator, writer, and artist who gives us one of the best comic strips since Bloom County (and one of quite the opposite politics, for the most part) deserves your contributions. If you’re a regular reader of Day by Day, go on over and spend a few bucks. You can get the book for free, you know.

Dissident Saudi Blogger Is Arrested

Farhan’s is the first arrest of a blogger in Saudi Arabia. Two Egyptian bloggers and one Tunisian are currently behind bars, according to Sami ben Gharbia, advocacy director for Global Voices, an international research group focused on the Internet and founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

I may attach a self-importance to myself for publishing my own blog. But I do so without risk of arrest. Others are not so fortunate.

Mike the Actuary’s Musings muses

Note to self: be nice if I should ever decide to blog about life in Saudi Arabia.

One man’s Blog observes that though the Saudis are holding out for an apology and that

If someone arrests you for excercising free speech and then you apologize for doing so, you’re clearly lying through your teeth.

Another great affront to the Saudi regime are ringtones

About 70 “Muslim dignitaries and scholars” met for a week to deal with vital moral issues, including those raised by technology. They concluded, for example, that the use of verses from the Koran as cell phone ringtones should be BANNED “because it impinges on the sacred character of the the Holy Book” and not, surprisingly, because it’s super annoying. However, uploading or recording such versions for private listening is “a virtuous act.”

Things must be great in Saudi Arabia if the greatest threats to the regime are bloggers and ringtones.

More at Instapundit.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Harrison’s blogging again.

Harrison, I can read your blog without having to crack a rib from trying not to laugh out loud now. I work from home four days a week. Not that I read blogs during the time I should be working. I just have to work a little longer if I check out blogs during the daytime.

Huckabee. Hmph. We’re Rudy Guiliani voters in this house. Well, I am. The cats frankly don’t give a damn who gets elected, so long as I keep the food and treats coming.

If you’ve never read Harrison, do yourself a favor and check any of the links under “Harrison’s Crunchy Bits,” and trust me when I tell you not to read them at work if you’re not supposed to be laughing at your desk, or while drinking or eating. Spit-monitor warning is in effect for most of them. (It’s been a while, I think at least one is serious, but I can’t recall.)

Tribute to a dog

Max’s first piano recital (cuteness overload)

Oh, so this is what Lair’s doing in his spare time. He’s not blogging much, but he’s calling Nardo and leaving instructions. (Language warning: Don’t play these at work without an earpiece.)

Click on the speaker to listen to them on the same page. I recommend Utter Crap #1, #2, and #3.

Of course, if you don’t like Lair Simon’s humor, you won’t like these. But he’s always been a favorite of mine.

Hm. I’m starting to think the stress was affecting me more than I’d realized.

Go check out this post by Elisson, my haftarah tutor. He’s talking about me.

Thanks, Elisson. It made me smile. Yeah, I think you were definitely there in spirit. Next time I chant haftarah, you’ll be there physically. Put 22 Cheshvan 5769 on your calendar. I think I’ll give it a try again next year. And oh, yeah—the reason I chose the date is because it’s the date I would have done my bat mitzvah originally.

The haftarah learning has been moving in fits and starts since last week. I finally found a tutor. Elisson has been helping me with my haftarah these last few days, and boy, have I found a gem of a teacher. He knows his subject, he’s good at it, and he’s good at teaching me how to do it. He adapted his trope pronunciation to the one I’m learning from my former rabbi’s mp3, which is helpful, considering I’ve just learned four different trope pronunciations in less than two weeks. Tonight, I finally figured out something that I’ve been having a lot of trouble with, that should make the lessons go a lot faster. We shall see what happens tomorrow; I am utterly wiped out tonight and need to go to bed. But before I do, I need to keep a promise.

Elisson told me about a cat post he wrote, which seems particularly fitting to my upcoming celebration: His kitty’s Bat Meowzah. (And yes, he does really use the word “Meowftir.” Go click the link, you’ll see.)

And while we’re on the subject of cats, I have some hot-off-the-presses pictures of Tig and Gracie today, and a couple from a few days ago.

Tig will lick Gracie’s ears and head from time to time. It’s a socialization thing with cats, and it’s also a mating behavior. In fact, quite often, Tig will lick Gracie’s ears, then bite her neck and mount her, even though he hasn’t had the stuff he’s needed to do anything since he was about six months old. That’s when Gracie tends to growl and yowl, I tend to yell, and Tig tends to run away. But while I was taking pictures, every time Tig started biting Gracie’s neck, I said, “Leave her!” and he backed off.

The backing off allowed me to get these shots. They look so cute together when they do this. You’d hardly know Tig is just about to beat the crap out of Gracie.

This one is from this morning. I left the door open (it was marvelous out), and the cats went in and out freely, then settled in. Tig decided to do his usual “dead cat lying in the sun” routine. Then Gracie showed up in this perfect little LOLCAT picture. I really think she wants to be an only cat.

“It wuznt me, occifer. I found him lyin there.”

There. Enjoy your kitty post. There’s been enough stress around here to cause a few cases of apoplexy; now we can look at cat pictures and de-stress.

I thought I had Mary Katherine Ham on my blogroll, but I didn’t. Now I do.

I like her. I love watching her on the cable news shows as their resident conservative internet expert. She was on CNN yesterday talking about Ann Coulter. We aren’t very far apart on what we think of the issue, and she made Dana Goldstein of TAPPED look practically incoherent. Here’s a tip, Dana: Lose the middle school girl vocal style. When you end every sentence with an upswing like a question, you sound childish, unsure, and unintelligent. That’s fine when you’re ten. But you’re a grownup now, and you need to learn to talk like a grownup. (She was actually pleased with her first TV appearance. Sad.)

Mary Katherine, on the other hand, has been professional from the get-go. And there’s something about her that makes me feel like we could be friends. Well, maybe next time I’m in New York, I’ll look her up. Of course, I’m going to feel really old meeting her, but hey—I tried going backwards. It doesn’t work.

Allah is depressed. Hot Air traffic is down. That’s probably because I’m not reading the site as much as I was before I became Haftarah Study Girl. (Don’t have the tropes down yet, but I did cut my haftarah mp3 into 1- and 2-minute chunks to help me work on individual trope, and thanks, Audacity, you effing rock).

So go over and check out Hot Air. Not just to cheer up Allah. (And by Allah, we mean Allahpundit the blogger, not that faux—well, I better stop here, don’t want a fatwa out on me.) But because Hot Air has some of the best reading material in the blogosphere. It’s got a nice mix of original commentary, funny or interesting YouTube videos, and excerpts of the hot issues of the day.

I can finally call Rob by his name when referring to his online persona.

Something that only my very long-time readers know is that the blogosphere would have caught up with Rob eventually no matter what—the man is talented, smart, personable, and innovative—but when Rob first arrived in the blogosphere, the only person he knew online was yours truly. He emailed me to let me know that he had started blogging. I linked to his first efforts, and emailed Glenn Reynolds that there was a new kid in town, and he was one to watch.

There’s a new kid in town. And I know him, so I’m throwing him some link-love. Go have a look at The Truth Laid Bear, a man who is finding his blog voice. (And the fact that he has blackmail pictures of me has nothing to do with my recommendation, I swear.) He has some interesting things to say about Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan. Okay, and me, too. (But that has nothing to do with my having blackmail pictures of him, I swear.)

Glenn agreed with me. Rob’s star rose in the blogosphere quickly, and he wrote an article about BBSes that was published by Salon and widely disseminated before the bits were dry on his first blog.

I met Rob in 1986, when we were both BBSing at several sites in New Jersey. He was friends with a programmer that wrote BBS software and ran his own BBS that my friends had all found and liked. My friends talked me into buying a modem and the rest, as they say, is history.

Programming Guy was your typical unsocialized programmer whose only friends at that time were other programmers at work, and some really smart kids like Rob. (Side note about Programming Guy: He’s now happily married. My friends and I left a trail of socialized programming geeks behind us in the late 80s and 90s. We helped them see that there is life outside of computers.)

So although Rob was just a cub when we met, that was over 20 years ago, and he’s not a cub any longer. And I’m nearing a milestone birthday next month, which is as close as I will come to admitting my age online until the weekend of my bat mitzvah.

But back to the subject at hand: Rob took his opportunity and ran with it. He was smart enough to invent and develop the TTLB ecosystem, and then all of the great things that grew out of his contacts and ingenuity. And now he’s off and running with a new company, because the money people discovered what I knew years ago: Rob is a great and talented guy, and he’s going to go places.

It’s true that he has a blackmail photo of me and a man who is now in the CIA. (Come to think of it, the blackmail is on the CIA guy, not me.) But hey, who doesn’t have a picture of themselves from the 80s that could be misconstrued by the casual viewer? I lost contact with CIA guy. I’ll never lose contact with Rob. And now, he’s out in the open as a regular guy with a real name. No more pseudonyms!

I don’t really have any blackmail photos of Rob, but I have a great picture of me sitting between Rob and Citizen Smash at a restaurant near the Pentagon in January. That was the day I drove up to have lunch with Rob and Scott after hearing that Rob was in DC for the week. That’s also the day I met the CIO of Company in Northern Virginia, which started me on the path toward my current employment. So in a way, Rob is responsible for my landing my current job. He got me to get my butt up to Northern VA. And a couple of weeks after the meeting, Company landed a contract that needed a web person, fast—and there I was, with my mad web skilz going unused.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, all this, and he helped me get a job, too—without even realizing it. The man is talented and lucky.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Rob Neppell, my old friend. Glad to finally be able to call you by name in a post. Mazel tov on the new company, and continued good luck and prosperity. And nu, you could call me once in a while… I have to find out from Hot Air that you’re no longer using a pseudonym?

Okay, that’s enough guilt. I’m so proud of him.

Looks like Patrick was right, and I was wrong, about the SiteMeter visitor count. Not about everything, mind you. But definitely about the major issue.

The things he was right about: If you stay on a high-traffic site while the visitor count refreshes, it counts you as a new visitor. The 30-minute rule is also in effect. If you drop off the visitor count, you do go back on as a new visitor. (Not unique, though; see below.)

The things he was wrong about: Unique visitors. Sorry, Patrick, but nope, they’re just visitors. SiteMeter doesn’t track uniques. As for having the ability to log more than 100 (or 4,000) visitors at a pop: Here, too, you are wrong. I have been informed by SiteMeter staff that arrangements could be made for higher-traffic sites. Which means they do collect the data, and it does not disappear into the ether.

The things we were both wrong about: SiteMeter does not use cookies to track visitors.

The things I was right about: Sorry, Patrick, but unless you have some programming background that I’m not aware of, you are a technical neophyte. That doesn’t mean you can’t catch things like the SiteMeter double count, and that wasn’t what I was implying. I was implying you were lacking a certain strategic depth to your knowledge due to a lack of understanding of certain technologies. But I was wrong about the concept you were getting across. I simply couldn’t fathom the idea that someone would write a visitor-tracking program that would allow a visitor to become brand-new if someone were still on the site, or clicking to another page. It seemed utterly counter-intuitive to me. But hey, there’s a lot of programming out there, and site statistics are utterly impossible to track with 100% accuracy. I have three different site trackers and three different traffic counts. I was also pretty much on the money about clickthroughs. You really can’t judge a DKos clickthrough rate as indicative of traffic rate. Clickthroughs from referring sites depend on so many reasons that they’re not indicators unless the site is specifically geared to drive traffic (a la Instapundit).

Things I can’t say for sure: I don’t know if his 60% figure is accurate. That one I think is not easily charted. Testing doesn’t tell you how many people are doing the thing you are testing for—only whether it works or not.

I could go point-by-point on the rest of the things, but, well, the argument is done.

There is no controversy regarding the Daily Kos visit count. Patrick Ruffini is misunderstanding the difference between what SiteMeter shows you on a summary page, and what is counted as a visit or a hit. SiteMeter is not inflating DKos’ site stats. In all probability, SiteMeter is undercounting DKos traffic, as it does with everyone. Let’s take Ruffini’s primary “gotcha” moment:

Then it hit me: SiteMeter only accounts for the last 100 visitors individually. On a site like Daily Kos, the 100th most recent visitor could have been 15 seconds ago. If you are the 101st most recent visitor and you click on a new page, you are counted as a new unique visitor in SiteMeter’s all important count. On a normal site, this wouldn’t matter, since it’s highly unlikely you’ll stick around long enough to have 100 others show up after you. On a site with hundreds of thousands of page views a day, it’s extremely likely you will.

Um, no. That’s not how it works.:

When you are browsing a site, every time you follow a link, it is treated as a single “page view”. Site Meter defines a “visit” as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.

You are counted by IP address, not by virtue of being on the SiteMeter “last 100 visits” page. If I go to DKos and read a post, click on the message thread, spend the next 40 minutes reading the messages, and then click on the main page again, that counts as a single visit. Ruffini wrongly thinks that a second click is counted as another unique visit. It is not. SiteMeter counts a second click as another page view, but page views are entirely different statistics from visits.

Another error in his thinking is that SiteMeter “only” counts the last 100 visitors. No, it counts them all. (Well, except for the ones it misses, which is another complaint about SiteMeter.) It only shows the last 100 visitors, and only in the default free view. When you become visitor 101, you are still tracked as if you were visitor number 15 on that block of visitors that Patrick saw on his screen. But you are no longer seen on the “Last 100 Visitors” screen. And you are just as active on SiteMeter’s radar as you were when you could see your IP address in the Visitor 15 Slot.

On Patrick’s second point, that the clickthrough rate isn’t as high as Andrew Sullivan’s, well, that’s due to a number of factors, and it’s a common problem even with high-traffic sites. I know that I have a high clickthrough rate, even though my blog isn’t a very high traffic blog, because my readers tend to be longstanding readers with similar tastes in reading materials. They also trust my opinions. Linkfests used to be a staple of this blog, and still are, in respect to Haveil Havalim.

People don’t go to DKos for linkage. They go to DKos to read what’s there. Glenn Reynolds entire site is about clickthrough. People read Instapundit because they want to find other bloggers or information that Glenn provides. High traffic doesn’t guarantee high clickthrough rates. I’m not surprised that most people did not click through to Patrick’s blog. The DKos readers do not like conservatives. They do not like Republicans. Of course they’re not going to click through.

The content of the link also makes a difference. My highest-traffic links from Glenn all had to do with sex. The Comic Book Superhero Dating Ratings? Through the roof. I think I got nearly 10k hits from Glenn, whereas an ordinary Instalink generated about half that number. If Patrick wants to see DKos clickthroughs in high numbers, he needs to post that he’s given up being a conservative Republican and has joined the ObamaWagon, or some such thing. Or maybe something to do with sex and Democrats.

Lastly, Patrick tries to extrapolate DKos traffic via some arcane formula he invents regarding page views and stats of similar blogs. Ah, no. Bad move. That’s like trying to calculate the traffic on the NJ Turnpike based on the traffic on I-95 in northern VA and the Long Island Expressway. Now he’s just reaching, and looking really silly while he does it.

In short, there are many reasons to criticize Daily Kos. But blaming SiteMeter for inflating DKos visits and pageviews? No. That’s just a case of Patrick not really understanding SiteMeter and server logs. I don’t have the best grasp of them either—it’s been a long time since I read the raw server logs and decoded them for my boss at Lucent—but I do know enough to know that Patrick is way off base on this one.

Update on the Quechup problem: Say, the nice folks at the brandy new social network are taking your contacts list without permission and using it to spam your friends! Isn’t that special? That’s why I got five invites in one day. Come on, tell me again how great these social networks are! And oh, yeah: The Quechup unsubscribe doesn’t work. I got another one yesterday and had to unsubscribe again.

Terrorists targeting children: Children at a daycare center in Sderot had a near-miss by a kassam rocket. The terrorists, of course, bragged about nearly murdering babies. Jameel has the horrifying video. A barrage of rockets in Sderot yesterday has so far been unanswered by the IDF.

Norm Finkelstein, real-life fink: Looks like Da Fink isn’t just unhappy he’s not getting tenure, he’s threatening DePaul faculty and staff and “angrily confronting” them. Gee. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t want to keep a guy like that around.

This week’s Haveil Havalim is up. Go, read, enjoy.

Well? What are you still doing here?

Click! Click!

Folks, if you were looking to help Rahel with the expenses toward her cat’s diabetes, you can hit my Paypal or Amazon tipjars and I will send the money along to Rahel.

She’s just advanced me the funds she received from her tipjar. Regular contributor Hugh S. put in an amount, and I’m adding my own contribution to the amount. I’ll be heading to the post office for an international envelope and sending Rahel a check for the amount. So if you want to contribute, I’ll wait until the end of the week before writing that check, and send it off Sunday for the first-thing-Monday mail.

By the way, the Lady has recovered completely from her diabetes, and Gracie is just about recovered from her IBD. Not bad for a couple of middle-aged kitties.

Okay, this is cool. I had no idea I had so many inbound links, but apparently, it’s up over 280,000.

You can have a real blogwar there, and find out which of your favorite bloggers have more or fewer inbound links than I. There’s a blogger—I won’t name names—that I thought was more popular than I. Turns out, not so much. Ha!

Yep. Ego. I’ve still got it.

Reut Cohen is doing her utmost to stop the anti-Semites at UC Irvine. She has an uphill battle.

Let’s say that there is a country called Christianland where 44 percent of the world’s Christians live, and whose total population is 76 percent Christian (Christians of all sects, from Catholics to Protestants and everyone in between). My club puts on a week of events that I claim aren’t anti-Christian, but I demonize the population and government of Christianland, saying that they don’t have a right to exist as a nation and that they must be destroyed by any means necessary (including, for example, suicide bombers). I doubt that many of you would say that I wasn’t being anti-Christian. Since there are so many Christians worldwide, this seems implausible, but if you substituted Israel for Christianland and Jews for Christians, then it isn’t so implausible. It’s already happened.

Last week, the MSU put on their week of events titled “Israel: Apartheid Resurrected,” and in doing so, proved that they were not being anti-Zionist (Zionism being the movement to create and support the state of Israel), but anti-Semitic. They will tell you otherwise, because they brought a “rabbi,” Dovid Weiss, who represents a group that makes up 0.04 percent of world Jewry. Weiss speaking for the Jewish population is like David Duke speaking for Christians; it just doesn’t make sense to have a radical member on the fringe of a group speak for the group.

But she’s getting results. She got a congressman to come and see the hate.

Put her on your reading list. She’s going on my blogroll.

Michael Weiss got two of the former Suck writers to appear in their Moveable Snipe feature, where two people email each other while taking apart five blogs.

If you can read this without laughing, you are a robot.

Does anyone use italics in the blogosphere better than Glenn Greenwald? I don’t think so, Tim, and I’m willing go to the mat on this. This guy gets it, you understand? In fact, sometimes he gets it with italics and bold. Just take a look at the long, indented paragraphs that run through his blog like, I don’t know, stink on rice (where is that Adderall?). Greenwald is the author of The New York Times bestseller How Would a Patriot Act? (yeah, I stopped reading too after “Times bestseller”) and the surefire forthcoming smash, Tragic Legacy, which will also savage George W. Bush. Finally, someone willing to take on an all-powerful president with approval ratings in the low 30s!

Too funny. Read it all, and Michael—mazel tov.

The U.S. Army has shut down all possible battle zone milblogging.

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules, obtained by Wired News, require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

“This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging,” said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. “No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — it’s most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced.”

There’s much more at The Danger Room, including a note to Reuters for stealing Noah’s story, and of course, not crediting him for it–let alone paying.

Let me add my voice to Noah’s opinion that this is a blisteringly stupid idea. Way to make sure that the good news doesn’t get out, guys.