Category: JWN updates

I just chose and posted the June 2003 Golden Oldies. I even managed to get them into the ‘Main Index Template’ without crashing the whole software system. Am I making progress, or what?
Anyway, check ’em out! You’ll find them, as always, on the righthand sidebar of the ‘Main’ page if you scroll down a bit.

So my first blogiversary here at JWN passed Feb 6 and I didn’t even blog that day. Oh well.
My first post, here, was about Colin Powell’s speech to the UN just the day before.
What a lot has happened in this past year!
Back in early January (2004) I wrote a CSM column urging that the administration should be held accountable for its many serious mis-statements over Iraqi WMDs– in Powell’s speech, and of course, elsewhere. I actually had no idea that that process of being-held-accountable would proceed as far and as fast as it has in the past month.
Not nearly enough, of course. I looked at the make-up of the Commission of Inquiry that the Prez himself appointed (to investigate himself… how does that work again??), and I noted along with most other commentators that of the seven folks named to date, only one has any depth of the relevant expertise.
Judge Wald, I know a little bit. She specialized in family law; then, about six or seven years ago she was named to the bench of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Continue reading “JWN blogiversary, etc”

Around 24 hours ago, both Internet Explorer and AOL started rendering the code for JWN in a very lame, primitive way.
I’m terrifically sorry if you were one of the readers affected.
In response to an appeal here, gallant reader Dan Z. leaped to my assistance and sent me a fix he thought would work.
But I’d been busting my own rear end meanwhile on finding a fix, and about an hour ago I found one.
So thanks, Dan– and sorry, the rest of you. I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again…
In the meantime, I’ve learned more about Cascading Style Sheets, positionizing text, the particular frailties of Internet Explorer, etc., etc. than I ever really wanted to know.
Back to the big picture, eh?

I just spent a bit of time going through JWN’s May archives, and for your reading pleasure I’ve now added that month’s Golden Oldies to the list on the main page.
Okay folks, I can tell from my usage stats that over the past week various readers have been visiting (and, I hope, enjoying) the earlier Golden Oldies I’d picked out for you… All the G.O.’s, that is, except one!!!
Why is this?
I’m particularly puzzled, because the post in question, “Military occupations: the good, the bad, and the possibly ugly” of March 21, 2003 was actually (if I may say it myself) one of my better ones.
It’s true, it was a long one. But that doesn’t seem to put most of you off. True, too, that I wrote it before I moved JWN over to ‘Movable Type’, so for longer posts I would sometimes post them up onto my UVA site and put a link in JWN to them there.
But I thought you guys could maybe handle something like a hyperlink??
To make things extremely easy for y’all, I’ve now uploaded that file into the JWN archive, and you can read it by clicking h-e-r-e.
It wasn’t perfect. Blogging is not, after all, a perfect art. But I’d put a fair amount of work into that post. You can, of course, sound off about the imperfections right there on the Comments board…
Oh, and don’t forget to check out the new, May additions to the G.O. list sometime.

I’m coming up to my First Blogiversary February 6, so I can tell y’all that now, nearly one year into the project, I know that trying to keep a good, lively blog up on the web is a heck of a lot of work!
So hats off to Yankeedoodle and Juan Cole who work tirelessly nearly every darn’ day of the year (barring snowstorms, Yankee) to bring us all the best, most relevant, liveliest, most pertinent news there is on the ongoing US imbroglio in Iraq.
Yankee’s blog, “Today in Iraq” keeps a person just about totally up-to-date with all the breaking developments on the US/’coalition’ side of things, with a minimum of commentary from YD (but that little, totally on-the-mark imho.)
Juan’s blog, “Informed Comment” gives us that erudite, wise professor’s up-to-theminute interpretation of what’s happening on the Iraqi side. Juan evidently gives the Arabic-language media a good reader every morning before he blogs. The rest of us are truly privileged to be able to read his presentation and interpretation of it.
I long ago came to the conclusion that unless I want this blog to take over my whole life, which I certainly don’t (despite what some of my family members occasionally say about me)… well, there is NO WAY I could even think of competing with YD or Juan in what either of them does.
Does that mean that I stop writing about Iraq? No, ma’am. Not at all.

Continue reading “Kudos to Yankeedoodle and Juan Cole!”

Over the holidays, I added some of my faves from my April 2003 JWN posts to the Golden Oldies listed on the “Main” page of the blog.
April was quite a month, and I had (imho) some pretty good posts then. So check out the Golden Oldies section– it’s near-ish the bottom of the right-hand side-bar on the “Main” page.
(I meant to do May as well. Didn’t have time yet.)

Our server was down for several hours today. *sigh*.
Sorry ’bout that.
Don’t know what it was all about. But it’s GMT 0130h on Saturday now and it’s back up. Long may it stay this way.

This week, I added a new section of “Golden oldies” to the sidebar at the right of the “Main” (a.k.a. “Main Index”) page. Check it out! It so far features some of my earliest JWN posts, from February and March 2003. Including several pre-war predictions that now look pretty prescient.
I also, fairly often, re-organize the “Links” section on that sidebar. So you should check that out, too, and visit some of the new items I feature there. I took off Salam/Pax’s blog because he hasn’t posted anything serious there for about a month.
Future plans: I’m considering mining some of the “Golden oldies” from my Al-Hayat columns and putting some links to them up on the sidebar, too. But I need some help from my filial technical advisor for that. Tarek, call your mother!
Finally, can anyone out there advise me how, in MT, to (probably retrospectively) tag some of my posts as “Golden oldies” so that the listing of them can be automatically generated by MT rather than me having to painstakingly write a bunch of new HTML into my “Main Index” template every time? Leave a comment here with the advice, or write me. Thanks!

What a week, already! The big suicide bomb in Haifa; Sharon launches a provoocative attack against Syria– and then, to cap that, the Prez of the World says he was quite right to do it…
So much I should be writing about… Also, two really thought-provoking stories in the NYT about the death penalty back on Monday, and another piece abvout various non-African companies moving in on the continent to get its people hooked on gambling…
And here I am, in Brooklyn, deeply engaged in the last throes of helping my daughter Leila prepare her wedding… It’s been fun, but also a lot of running around.
I’ll be back in regular commentator/essayist mode early next week. Hey, maybe I can even write a lyrical post or two about the joys of wedding planning. (We checked out the midtown-Manhattan Flower District yesterday: that was great experience. We’ll go in early Friday a.m. to buy the flowers.)
Also, along the way, I wrote a column for my regular slot in the CSM: it’ll be in Thursday’s paper (Oct. 9). Check it out if you can, at www.csmonitor.com.

In about six weeks, my elder daughter is getting married in New York City. I’m currently doing some things to help her and her fiance with planning the wedding. It’s fun to be in NYC, but time-consuming. I’ll get back to JWN early next week.