Yourish.com

A heads-up to my regulars: The reason there are suddenly a few dozen new comments is because my last post on the Swedish blood libel got picked up by Yahoo! News.

I’m not quite sure how or why my posts get picked up and put on the “Most blogged about” links, but I am always grateful to the people at Yahoo! when that happens. The commenters that come in, not so much. But then again, I get to add to my Freakmail folder for future mockery.

I’m very glad that opposing viewpoints are supported by Yahoo! I’m switching Firefox to their search engine to show my support. (Not really sure about that Bing thing yet, but maybe it will get better.)

One of these days, I’ll get back to posting Caturday posts. But not today. Working on the podcast. (Which I need to update, Sabba Hillel, I know, I know. I will.)

It’s been pretty busy at work. I have a few post ideas kicking around, but no time to write them. I’ll try to get to them tonight.

I’m getting something like 40% of my traffic from feeds now. I don’t mean referrers from people like Sammy and Elder (though I am very grateful to them both). I mean from people getting my posts via their newsreaders.

That makes sense. I get the blogs I don’t have the desire to go to physically anymore via feed. And if there’s a post I like over at Omri’s (which is, dammit, almost every one), then I’ll go check in on his blog and read more than the summary that his annoying feed now sends (SOME of us send the WHOLE post via our RSS feed, hint, hint, hint).

You’ll have to remind me of this the next time I gripe that my readership is down.

Got slammed with work today and will be in class for the next three days up in NorVA. Oh, and I am currently suffering an influx of ants.

Fun, fun, fun.

I’ll have time to post tomorrow night. But not until.

I got tired of the sticky post thingie. Poll is here.

Thanks for taking the poll. I’ll be bumping it to the top again on Monday. In the meantime, your comments have already been extremely helpful. One person suggested I write about “observations on American society and people’s behaviours,” and, well, that’s a great idea. “American Scene” is going to become a regular blog feature.

Someone else wanted me to discuss internal Israeli issues, such as conversion. Sorry, never gonna happen. First, I’m not Israeli, so I can offer, at best, an outsider’s viewpoint. Secondly, you know what? I have no desire to start religious arguments on my blog. And every time I discuss something like conversion, it brings out the worst in people. I’m going to stick to pissing off mostly non-Jews, rather than starting Jewish religious wars. It’s what I’ve been doing for eight years, and that’s not about to change. I prefer to leave religion to those that are far more knowledgeable than I.

Keep the suggestions coming. I think I’ve figured out the new format, and it’s going to involve new subjects and weekly posts on those subjects, sort of like daily newspaper sections—like the New York Times having the science section on Tuesdays, entertainment on Wednesdays, etc., etc.

And expect to see more posts on feminist issues. Now those ought to bring out the comments in droves.

This blog has become a broken record. I can recycle posts from two years ago, and very little will have changed. I’m bored. You’re bored. Traffic is down. Commenting is almost nonexistent. Things need to change.

What do you want to see? I really have no idea, at this moment, what my readers want. I know a lot of you are still happy with what I’m doing, but I’m not nearly as happy doing it as I was a few years ago. Change has been the raison d’blog—when this blog gets stale, it must change or die. I don’t think I’m ready to give it up. So help me figure out how to change it.

You can add your own suggestions in the “Other” field. Please take the time if you have an idea for me.

Your input is critical, even if you never, ever comment here. If I get only a few dozen answers, well, that’s not exactly representative of the thousands of visitors I get per day. So come on, take a minute to click on the poll buttons.

You have to understand something: I’m tired of my own blog. That means that I may not want to continue blogging if I can’t change it to something that I’m happy about again. If you want me to keep blogging, well, help me out here. Because although I don’t want to quit blogging, that, too, is an option. It would free up a whole lot of time in my life.

Vote, please.

(P.S.: I opened comments. Forgot that I’d closed them to all but registered users lately.)

I’m getting spammed like crazy, and while the comments are going into the spam filter, it annoys me enough that I’ve just turned registration back on in order to comment.

Which means the spammers will force me to close registration shortly, I’m sure.

Oh, well.

Okay, I’m trying to revive my programming chops to add a “next post/last post” tag to the current theme, and, well, not doing so well at it. Since I only have a few more hours to myself this afternoon, it’s going to have to wait until I have more time.

Unless one of my programming readers wants to traverse the WordPress Codex and give me the lines of code I’ll need to add to the file.

I would like to figure it out for myself, but time is in short supply these days.

I will also be auditioning comment plug-ins. When one is deemed safe from attack, I’ll add it to make commenting a bit easier. Mind you, the rules still apply: No flames, and no Israel bashing.

Lucida. Ugh. I’ll take a simple Helvetica clone over that any day.

I also need to do a bit of tweaking to make the text more readable. I don’t know why people seem to think that 100% black isn’t a readable font. It works for me.

You know, I may just stick with this theme and add my old header to it and change some colors around. It’s good for me to get into some CSS work somewhere besides the workplace.

Suggestions?

Update: Oops, missed a few font calls in the style sheet. I’ll get to them later.

I’d like to thank you all for sticking with me these past couple of weeks. The site statistics have barely changed at all even through all the blog-hopping, changing to the old html style, and going through all the changes right here on WordPress.

I have some pretty awesome readers.

Still have a lot of posts over on my Blogspot blog that probably won’t get transferred over here, as you can get them on Soccer Dad’s and Snoopy’s blogs. Jack’s too.

I’ll be putting a few of the Blogspot posts over to here, but you’ll need to go to the above blogs to read anything that was crossposted in the last couple of weeks. In fact, I highly recommend reading my cobloggers’ blogs, as they don’t post all of their posts here.

We should be back to business as usual regarding posting. User registration is closed until further notice. Comments are open for now, but you must be registered and logged in to post a comment.

Give us a few more weeks to get back to normal. We want to make sure I don’t have to use my Blogspot blog again.

Okay, if you’re having trouble getting an RSS feed, close out your email/RSS client and restart it. I had to do that with Thunderbird, and you may have to do it with yours. We’re working on the rest of the RSS problems.

Give us a little bit of time to get things going. I’ll let you know what needs to be done once we’re ready.

I have out-of-town company, and that utterly trumps approving anti-Israel comments in a day-old post. Or any other bloggy stuff.

It’s going to be gorgeous tomorrow, and we’ll be seeing the sights.

If you’re a regular reader and want to comment sometime in the future, you may want to register now before I make commenting registration-only again.

I don’t need a lot of information—but you do need a valid email address or you can’t reset your password when you misplace it.

I just disabled registration and enabled commenting.

Soccer Dad’s previous post got picked up by Yahoo! News.

Shall we start a pool on the number of anti-Israel comments that wind up in the moderation queue?

Update: Two in eleven minutes.

Update two: Way more than that. Five in the pending queue (probably won’t get approved), several approved, and more coming.

At least until the spammers twig to it again and start adding bogus accounts. Not that it really does them any good. I have about four or five levels of spam protection for the blog.

For a reason that I can’t determine, some legitimate user comments are heading into the spam filter. I rescued three of them today, but a few were a couple of days old.

If you’re a regular commenter here, and your comment disappears into the ether, let me know.

Registration is closed because, once again, I am tired of seeing spammers register tons of bogus accounts. I would go into details about how I can tell they’re spammers, but that would simply give the more enterprising ones ways of getting around my methods.

If you would like to register an account for commenting purposes, email me. It’s an easy one to remember: My first name at my last name dot com.

Yes, my site was suspended again today. There seems to be a SQL query problem that was hanging up the CPU on my server, and Bluehost frowns upon that. So I was down for quite some time, until I brought in the big guns, a friend of mine who could staff Bluehost’s entire tech and abuse department single-handed. We figured out a likely culprit and, we think, solved the problem. I’ll know for sure in a week or so.

I have to say I’m not very fond of Bluehost’s habit of suspending your site until you convince them you can fix, or have fixed, the problem. None of my other hosts ever did that when there was a CPU problem.

In any case, things are working again. If I’m right about what was wrong, they should stay working.

I’m tired of Russian spammers registering bogus user accounts, so registration is going to be closed until I feel like reopening it.

If you’re not a Russian spammer, and not an anti-Israel tool, email me and I’ll see about squeezing you in.

Sorry, folks. I had site issues that caused Bluehost to suspend my account. Something was making me a CPU hog, and apparently, the punishment for that is very severe. Plus, I was at Job in Northern Virginia, so my time to fix things was limited. Which is why I got Jay to update the software for me.

And when I got home from work, the last thing I wanted to do was work on the site. Especially since the premiere of Lost was tonight.

(Wow, they did it again. Bad guys, good guys, who can tell?)

Well, we’re back now. And you’ll have more substantive posts tomorrow. In the meantime, we can all discuss Lost in the comments to this post.

Sawyer. Dude. Lose the extra weight. Or bring back Jin, ’cause you’re just not doing it for me anymore.

(I’m so lying. I’ll take him, flabby belly and all.)