Category: The Blog

Something that’s been bothering me for a while now is that due to this post, I get Google hits on literally a daily basis from people who’ve used the search term “evil Jews”.

Of course, I don’t know why all these people are searching for that particular phrase, but I think it’s a safe bet that at least some of them are looking for “proof” that Jews are evil. And as a Jew, I find that upsetting.

There’s not a lot I can do to change the minds of most of those people. However, I feel that I have a responsibility to do something about the fact that some small number of them may be ending up at my website. As an initial attempt at a response, I’ve added a new graphic link to the sidebar: the Holocaust History Project.

If just one misguided person can end up at that website and learn that some of the lies they were told about Jews are just that — lies — then I’ll have done a little bit of good.

Still no Internet access chez Lux and not sure when it’s going to be back up.

This sux.

Comcast took us offline for about 24 hours, for the second time in less than a month. This is getting annoying.

Friday night, I get home from a long week of work and classes, wanting nothing more than to catch up on the news and have some fun on my computer, but to my dismay, our ‘net access was down and remained so until just a few minutes ago.

“Comcastic” my butt. Sorry about the lack of blogging.

For the next few months, Wednesday are my Hell Days; I leave the house about 8 AM and don’t get home until after 10PM. Since it’s Bad Form to blog from work or in-class, expect little to no blogging on Wednesdays.

I try to steer clear of meta-blog posts, and doing two in a week is definitely not usual for me, but given that Fiat Lux has recently been added to a few more blogrolls around the Internet, I though it might be a good idea to explain a little bit about my own blogroll and how one gets into it.

My Blogroll / Link Policy

I use Bloglines as my primary RSS feed aggregator. What I’ve been trying recently is this: I’ve self-imposed a limit on the number of blogs in my blogroll as a way of keeping my blog-reading habit under control. Any time I add a new blog to my Bloglines list, I force myself to remove an old one.

Bloglines also happens to have a neat little feature that lets me paste a bit of JavaScript into a template and my current list gets automagically updated on my website. It’s less work for me that way, but it does have the drawback that I can’t easily do “courtesy” blogroll additions unless I break my self-imposed rule above, get funky with my Bloglines setup and/or manually maintain that list.

The exception to this plan is the list of personal weblogs written by people that I know in real life. I keep their blogs in a private folder on Bloglines and manually maintain a selected list of those here on my weblog.

In short, if you want to get into my blogroll, you have to be better / smarter / funnier / more interesting than somebody on the current list, or you have to be a friend or family member. I do read blogs that are not on my blogroll, generally by clicking through other people’s links and blogrolls, but that’s reserved for days when I have more time on my hands.

So that’s how my blogroll works. If I come up with a better way of managing things, I’ll switch to it; ultimately this is about keeping things easy, informative and fun for me. Incidentally, that’s also why I do not use Technorati tags. Writing posts is fun; messing around with tags isn’t.

And while I’m at it, here’s two other meta-blogging bits and pieces:

Comment Policy

I have a very simple comments policy. I reserve the right to remove any comment left on this site, for any reason or for no reason at all. I pay for the web hosting; I get to decide how my disk space and bandwidth are used. However, I do not edit comments; that seems unfair. If they do not get tossed into the bit bucket, they remain as their authors wrote them.

Advertising

At one point I had a tip jar up here; it’s not anymore. I decided that this site is a hobby, and I’m not going to ask people to subsidize my fun. If my traffic were to rise to the point where I had to pay significantly more for hosting, I might reconsider and put up some ads, but for now, this site stays ad and tip jar free.