Recent hosting service malfunction

The webhosting service’s databases were down (out?) for 16 hours there. People could not post comments in that time. Nor could I put up any new posts.
Actually, I didn’t try to. Bill and I had guests yesterday afternoon– our old friends Benny and Leah Morris. We had some extremely interesting conversations. More, later. (Maybe.)
Today and tomorrow I’m crashing on finishing my review of the copyedits on the Africa book.

Travel, minor frustrations, etc

This morning I’m in Charles de Gaulle airport en route to Amman for the UN University event there. I should start working on the lecture I’m to give, eh?
Actually, one of the greqt things about this blog is that serves as warm-up exercises for my thinking… So when I have a big deadline due I can review things I’ve written here recently and bingo, up pops the topic and the way to qpproqch it;
Yesterday, JWN was down for q good part of the day. I’m really sorry about that… I don’t know what hqppened. I fired off an email to the owner of the hosting service, qnd eventuqlly it cqme bqck up. I was sitting in Atlqntq qirport there composing those three posts offline.
Today, as you can see, I’m struggling with a French-lqnguqge keyboard here… Instead of starting off QWERTY it starts off AZERTY, and my brain and fingers find this hard to handle.
Au revoir and ila-l-liqa’.

Commentary editor contributes to JWN?

I’d like to express my big thanks to Neal Kozodoy, a distinguished colleague in the journalism profession– indeed, he’s the longtime editor of Commentary magazine, a key mouthpiece for the whole US neoconservative movement…. Now, it seems that Neal has been contributing considerable amounts of his intellectual property, gratis, to Just World News over the past two and a half weeks.
I am even considering preparing a little paper version of some of our exchanges here, which I can sell and send the profits to, say, the Atfaluna project in Gaza, one of my longtime favorites. (If any JWN readers want to help with this publication, let me know.)
Thank you so much for your contributions, Neal.
I guess I still have a lingering question or two. Does your Board of Trustees over there at the American Jewish Committee, which publishes your mag, realize how much time you’ve been spending– during what appears to me to have been your workdays– in composing sometimes lengthy contributions to JWN? (87 of them within the single 17-day period from March 21 through yesterday, indeed.)
Also, why did you suddenly stop contributing yesterday afternoon? Intriguingly, that seemed to happen right after I’d mentioned the possibility– in this discussion– that our frequent commenter “Neal” might indeed be Commentary’s Neal Kozodoy. Were you shy?
So anyway, Neal, come on back! But don’t be shy next time. Use your full name.

    Update Tuesday 1:05 p.m.: “Neal”, the commenter has informed me that he is not Neal Kozodoy. He writes: “For the record, I am not in any way associated with Commentary. I do not even subscribe to the magazine. I do not agree with the magazine’s editorial line either./ There are a small number of writers I have read in Commentary who, in my view, are first rate scholars.” He also writes, “I prefer to maintain my anonymity.”
    So his true identity is still shrouded in mystery. That’s a pity. The discussion here is much richer, more authentic, and more constructive when commenters give us some indication of the life experience and expertise they bring to their contributions. Neal writes, “there are a few topics about which I know a great deal. One of those things is the treatment of non-Muslims in the Muslim regions. The other is Islamic theology. And I know a fair amount about the history of the Muslim regions.” But we have no means of testing these claims to expertise if we don’t know who he is.

Two good blog discussions…

I wish I had more time to spend on moderating the discussions on this blog, which frequently become shrill and excessively combative. On the other hand, most readers are adults who can figure out for themselves whether and how to “read” the comments boards.
In general, though, the ability to have this kind of cross-continental, open-ended discussion is a treasure that I don’t want to curtail too much. It really does allow for the creation of new knowledge and new understanding. (I have long believed that knowledge is an essentially social rather than individual creation… I mean, who taught Tom Hobbes and John Locke to speak and to express themselves, in the first place? Their ability to reason and to argue sure as heck didn’t “grow like mushrooms out of the ground” at all…. Ooops, end of communitarian rant, here.)
So anyway, I thought readers might like to see some useful new knowledge being created in these two portions of the blogosphere:

    — Jonathan’s recent post (and the subsequent discussion) on the constitution and meaning of the Hamas government lineup, and
    — Reidar Visser’s comment (in particular), as posted onto my post here yesterday about the continuing, extremely high-stakes political wrangling in Iraq.

Once JWN readers and commenters see how constructive discussions like this actually work, and how they serve us all by expanding the available knowledge base, perhaps you will all be a bit more mindful that this effect does not occur if people get into name-calling of the “hateful Helena” (or “hateful anyone else”) variety, or if they don’t actually make an effort to contribute new knowledge or their own thoughtfully conceived questions to the discussion. Also, it doesn’t really occur very easily if people go wildly off topic.
… One thing I’ve considered here is to see if anyone wants to take on the role of JWN’s “Bernhard”. Bernhard is the guy who started a parallel-universe blog called Moon of Alabama, where people could comment on Billmon’s Whiskey Bar blog, after Billmon shut down his comment section. MoA has evolved quite a bit since then.
Bernhard’s comments here are interesting. Actually, suddenly I’m thinking: why not ask Bernhard to run a JWN comment-site?
Does anyone have any other suggestions? Mail me.

Comment-posting problem solved

I think that the tech advisor and I (principally him) have now solved the problems JWN commenters have been experiencing over the past week. I’m not sure if your comments will actually publish onto the blog any faster than they used to. But at least, they should not now give the impression of “timing out” by coming back at you with error messages. And the counting thingy should be working properly.
Thanks so much, TA! Now have a good and safe time for the rest of your snowboarding vacation.

Some server problems here

We’ve been having some minor server problems here the past couple of days. If you try to post a comment you may get a “500 internal server error” message back. It’s quite probable, though, that despite that message your comment will have been posted onto the correct page successfully.
But also, the counter thingy that tells you on the front page the number of comments on each post has been failing to count the newly posted comments.
So there may be many recently posted comments on the blog that you’re not aware of. (Including, possibly, ones you may have posted yourself and gotten the “500 internal server error” message for.)
Sorry about this glitch in service. Keep posting your comments! My trusty tech advisor and I will continue trying to fix this.

JWN site design things

This past week has been a time for tweaking the HTML on many aspects of both this blog and the new group blog, Transitional Justice Forum.
You’ll see I’ve changed a couple of things on the sidebar here, which I do from time to time. One of the most useful things I did on JWN, though, was to make the “Topics” index much more useful. Instead of coming up with an e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y lengthy fulltext version of all the posts that I’ve filed under each particular category, it now comes up with just a listing, with each item followed by the standard RSS-style excerpt of the post in question.
If you haven’t used the “Topics” index before, you’ll find it down near the bottom of the right sidebar.
So do we still need the sidebar’s listing of ‘JWN Golden Oldies’, I wonder? I haven’t actually added anything to it since the end of 2003… the items on it are become more olden-and-golden with every month that passes. It was kind of a pain to pull it together month by month, back when I was doing it. Maybe I should just let the Topics listing and the MT Search capability do their job and forget the Golden Oldies. (Or I could put their listing into a simple link-to file rather than having them all right there on the sidebar.)
Could the site use a second sidebar, I wonder?
More on Topics’, aka ‘Categories’… I see this MT3.2 that I now have allows for sub-categories as well as main categories… I had tried for something of the same effect recently when I decided to add date-based listings to the main “Iraq” category, which had become completely unwieldy… But it’s not nearly as unwieldy now that I have the excerpt-only delivery system. So I’ve got a couple of different options with “Iraq” now, that I need to sort out… Also, since the Categories (Topics) now do look so much more useful than hitherto, I should go through the whole JWN archive and try to make sure the categories (including multiple categories) are appropriately assigned and indeed appropriately chosen… Sounds like more fairly detailed work… for someone…
Anyway, now that I’m thinking about all this stuff, do send in your comments, reactions, and suggestions re the design of the site. And if you’d like to help with checking out the Category assignations for the archive, or have some good ideas ideas about the present choice of items under Categories, please let me know about that, as well.

Still tweaking comments control here…

More apologies this evening on the comments. This new software has an automatic comment-controller that– unknown to me– was eating up most of your comments and describing them as (sad to say!) “junk”!
Don’t feel bad about it. It even ate up a comment I was trying to post and described it as junk.
So I had to go in and change the settings on that. That freed up everyone’s comments… So let’s hope that I have now finally licked the last software glitch here??
Maybe tomorrow I’ll even have some time to write something substantive. H’mmm.
Meantime, please, y’all keep the comments coming so I can see if my settings are working! (Also, so you can express yourselves.) Thanks!
Update Wed. morning: It looks as though I got the junk filter tweaked just about right here. The filter let through a bunch of y’all’s legitimate comments but caught and put into a buffer-zone five comments that were ads for some male-enhancement product. One of the problems is that when I use words like “porn” in the title of a post they tend to attract certain spambots. But this filter on MT 3.2 seems good.
Can any readers familiar with MT 3.2 or similar tell me whether I can just rely on its integral filter and stop using MT-Blacklist now? Would that speed up the comment-posting process for legitimate commenters?
Also, what are the advantages and disadvantages of instituting a commenter’s registration process?
Thanks for any advice!

New X-linking with ‘Today in Iraq’

Over the weekend, Yankeedoodle and his friends who write Today in Iraq sent me an invitation to cross-post my Iraq-related posts from here onto their fine blog.
I said “Yes”. It’s a great idea. I have often cited either their blog directly, or materials I found on it (always with, I hope, due hat-tips to TII.)
You can find my inaugural TII post here.
For now, I don’t think I’ll be posting anything new there that I’m not posting here. Mainly, it’s to let their readers know what’s going on here.
The two blogs are fairly different in style, so there’s some useful complementarity in this new move, I think. TII is an excellent compilation blog that makes a substantial success of being a “compilation blog of record” about the US war in Iraq. Between the painstakingly produced main posts and the supplementary links people send in to their comments boards, it provides a very full picture, day by day by excruciating day, of all that the war has brought to Iraq– and to the US, and other countries affected by it.
In addition, YD and his veteran co-authors Matt and Friendly Fire bring their own wit, sense of irony, and occasional “rants” to the readers, too.
JWN, as you’ve probably figured by now, doesn’t attempt to be– at least, at the day-by-day level– a blog of any kind of complete “record”. It is quirky, eclectic (some might say disorganized), discursive, and sometimes passionate. It deals with a lot more than “just” the US war in Iraq. In it, I try to identify and explore big trends and issues in global affairs, though I am also still so much of an unreconstructed news junkie that the latest op-eds from the NYT and the WaPo or the latest pronunciamento from Planet Cole do, I admit, sometimes disproportionately distract my attention.
I also use JWN for many of my own purposes: trying out ideas, archiving links to matters of interest, seeking information, etc.
In addition, I generally really love the discussions on the comments boards here. They are often very substantive and reflect good and generally civil interactions among a bunch of people from different countries and different worldviews.
(The comments boards on TII generally serve a different purpose. In line with the main, info-compiling mission of the blog they serve more as a bulletin board to exchange new information, than a place for sustained conversations.)
Anyway, I’m excited about working with Yankee, Matt, and Friendly in this way. Thanks, guys, for tossing me the key to the executive washroom there on TII! (And thanks, Yankee, for that great story you told me about one certain executive washroom… )

Discussing ‘Gallipoli?’

The post I put up here Monday about Gallipoli has already started to generate one of the most interesting cross-cultural discussions I’ve ever seen in the blogosphere… It’s definitely worth following the whole flow of the comments there.
Commenters include some fairly vocal Ozzies (oops, sorry, Aussies!) and Kiwis, not all of whom agree with each other– or me!– but all of whom are definitely eager to explain their points of view… a Singing Nun… the descendant of several Lebanese (or perhaps in those days they called themselves Syrians) who had been conscripted into the Ottoman Army and fought to defend the peninsula… and Yankeedoodle of Daily War News in unprecedented (for me) military historian cum “our roving correspondent” mode…
But that’s not all. As I say, definitely worth a peruse.
Note: I want to keep all the Gallipoli discussion in one place– over on that post, not here. So despite possible appearances to the contrary this post is closed to comments.