Notable Links from the Internet:
The Best Overall:
On Israel:
Art Links:
- Parshat Acharei Mot: Leviticus 16:10 Scapegoat by by William Holman Hunt
וְהַשָּׂעִיר, אֲשֶׁר עָלָה עָלָיו הַגּוֹרָל לַעֲזָאזֵל, יָעֳמַד-חַי לִפְנֵי יְהוָה, לְכַפֵּר עָלָיו–לְשַׁלַּח אֹתוֹ לַעֲזָאזֵל הַמִּדְבָּרָה
“But the goat, on which the lot fell for Azazel, shall be set alive before the LORD, to make atonement over him, to send him away for Azazel into the wilderness.”
This a good example of a pre-Raphaelite school painting.
- Israel Broytman, painter
Famous Bloggers:
From this article:
Male bloggers tend to write about politics, technology and money; women are more likely to blog about their private lives and use an intimate style of writing.
At some point, I may do a post about women bloggers. Especially on how they deal with conflict. If anyone finds any relevant links, feel free to leave them in the comments. Or any of your own experiences with conflict and blogging. (Jack tried to help me find some a few weeks back, but the ones he sent me didn’t seem to fit my idea. Thanks for trying, Jack).
This is a “baby” blog. It was born in December 2007. One of the ways I hope to bring it from babyhood to toddlerdom is by honoring my commenters.
Taking a cue from the Rambam, the twelfth-century philosopher and expert in Jewish law who talks about 8 degrees of charity, I came up with 4 levels of commenting etiquette.
Level One: this is kind of a pre-level. It just learning how to leave a comment on someone else’s blog. You are not writing a whole post, but stating something in as clear a fashion as you can.
Level Two: Thank those who leave comments on your site. I still remember when I posted a comment on E-Kvetcher’s site on loshon hara (laws of gossip–a topic I would like to blog about, some time, some day). Look what a nice comment he left for me, after I left a few longish comments (I initiated the use of the term ‘blab’): “Leora, welcome and feel free to blab away.”
Level Three: If someone comments on your site, and you have never visited their site, go back and visit their site. And leave a comment. On something. Here was Jack’s first comment on my site, on my anti-pantyhose post: “Men are far more practical. No pantyhose, no pumps, no girdles.” So I went back to his site to find a post on which I could leave a comment. No comment on the particular post I found; it was one of Jack’s strange ones. I’ll give a link to Jack’s Comments on Commenting instead.
Level Four: Finally, the highest level is to link to a blogger or a blogger’s post in one of your posts. Search engines don’t follow the links in comments. But they do follow the links in posts. So here are links to blog posts by people who commented in the past week:
Finally, thank you to Jill, and here’s a link to her Flower for Kiersten painting.
Hakarat hatov = Recognizing the good (Hebrew expression)
I’ve participated in two blog carnivals, and here are the links:
Haveil Haveilim 161: Pidgeon Break
I looked up “pidgeon” and found this:
rats with wings, a person, usually a martin, with a barrel chest and pronounced curve in their rig that makes their ass trail behind their shoulders by an inch or so.
And the delicious kosher cooking carnival, #29, pre-Passover edition.
In a fit of insanity, I seemed to have volunteered to do the August Kosher Cooking Carnival. More on that much, much later.
It is a lot of fun to participate in these carnivals. Humor and waffle jokes fly about (though many of the posts are serious and seriously informative, especially in Haveil Haveilim). Kudos to all the hosts and bloggers.
I had great fun this past week creating a new header for a popular blog called:
A Mother in Israel
If you are interested in parenting, breastfeeding, interviews with other bloggers, life in Israel, burkas or potato kugel, mom in Israel has a lot going on.
Mom emailed me a variety of pictures; the final header has abundant, colorful fruit in a market, a child’s tricycle, challah, a laundry basket and squeegee, and a boy in a cap at the beach. I asked my children to review the header before forwarding the final version; my daughter remarked the bike looked like it was in the market and the laundry looked like it was on the beach! Bravo, daughter. Great to have assistants like you.
A few of my favorites:
Finally, here are links to two very touching posts:
My Aliyah Part I
and My Aliyah Part II. In these posts she talks about the sudden death of her mother, loneliness and grief, and making friends in a new place.
She is funny, personable, and informative. I hope you’ll enjoy her blog as much as I do.
I have this livejournal account, mostly so I could answer Daniel Saunder‘s posts. Daniel writes about severe depression and Judaism, two topics about which I have experience, and Doctor Who, about which I know very little. (I don’t even own a tv, though I’m sure my older son could show me how to watch it on the internet if I were really interested). Daniel had a great post last week about Rav Soloveitchik’s Halachik Man. It takes a while to read his posts. He recently posted a best of the Blog, in which he starts out by saying:
I think part of my problem with blogging is that I can not decide what my blog is for. I sometimes think of it as a place where I can be myself, where I can explore all of my various, unconnected interests, in which case it does not matter who reads it. However, I also think of it as a way of delivering a message of some kind, of exploring certain ideas that I want relate to people in one or other of the sub-cultural groups that I am in, so it becomes necessary to reach that particular audience, whether of Doctor Who fans or Orthodox Jews or some other group.
Except perhaps for the Doctor Who part, this paragraph is one many bloggers can relate to. Who are we talking to and why?
Last week someone stopped me and said: “I found your blog!”
Uh, oh, I think. What did I say? Is someone REAL finding my blog? Someone I’m going to meet on the street (actually, it was in the back of my kids’ school)? Turns out, she has a great blog herself, and here it is: elinka.livejournal.com. Oh, by the way, it helps if you know Russian. Sometimes she writes “Shavua Tov” in Russian (Shavua Tov means Have a Good Week. In Hebrew). You can always enjoy the cute pictures.
I took a look around Live Journal tonight, and my account said I have no friends. Don’t you love it when you sign up for something new, and it tells you that you have no friends?
Finally, it asked this question:
What talent do you have that you wish more people would recognize?
I don’t know the answer. Do you have an answer?
My son, middle son, the one who once commented on my blog as me, who is up too late playing computer games next to me, said I should have said “fishing.”
One of the live journal bloggers answered:
I can fly.
Jack is a clever blogger. I have about ten ideas for posts in my head, but only time to write one quick one, as my children are now arising, and the real day is beginning.
So, here’s a link to Jack’s blog:
Second Annual Link to Jack Day.
We should all be as clever as Jack!
For all those who care to know about fellow bloggers: Juggling Frogs is reportedly fine and busy preparing for a family simcha (celebration). Nice to hear good news.
A few days ago I created a Tag Cloud for my sidebar. What’s a Tag Cloud, you ask? Go down to where it says Popular Tags. If you roll your mouse over one of the tags, you can see how many posts I have done that have that tag. And if you click on it, you can read those posts. Now, being an artist, I wanted the smaller tags to balance more nicely with the larger tags. So ideally I would want some little tag that begins with an ‘a’ or a ‘b’ to balance those larger ones. That’s just more interesting than starting my cooking for Shabbat.
Finally, I am pleased to say that Akismet, the anti-spam module that comes with WordPress, let Therapydoc post a comment without my having to take it out of spam, where it previously put her comment. So my fears of having to check continually to see if I have false positives in my Akismet comments were unfounded. This stuff works, after all. (Basically, I like WordPress).
Do you find yourself thinking about your next post? Or your next comment? Do you wonder how a blogger is doing, if the blogger hasn’t posted in a week or two?
For me, it all started last summer, when Noah Feldman wrote his notorious piece for the New York Times Magazine about how Maimonides School, my alma mater and his, had the audacity to crop him and his fiancée out of a photo. I found myself calling my friends in the Boston area to ask their reactions. No one seemed terribly interested. “Oh,” said one of my friends. “I remember when he came to visit Harvard, when he was still in high school.” What do you want to do, my friend had asked. The response was something about helping people. My friend at first interpreted this to mean he wanted to enter a career such as social work. Upon further discussion, she discovered what he really meant was he wanted to be President of the United States. Whatever.
Anyway, I found myself Googling “Noah Feldman” and “Maimonides School” in Google Search Blogs. Fast forward a month or two, I got hooked on my Google Reader and dozens of blogs. The other day, one of my son’s friends remarked on how many emails I had. “No, those are posts in my Google Reader, ” I explained. Though I do get an awful lot of emails, too, especially when during the week when I am working.
Commenting was the next step. Somehow, it was very difficult at first to leave a comment; I felt vulnerable, exposed. “You’ll regret what you wrote,” remarked one friend, who feels that way about what she says at times. But after a while I was more comfortable with the commenting process. I do tend to hesitate before commenting, and I edit and re-edit my comments, as though the whole world will read them and misunderstand them.
Finally, I set up my own blog. This was fun! As I am a web designer and developer, I have my own website already. I had read good things about WordPress, and I had an enjoyable time in December setting up the site.
Some people start blogs because they have something to say and a need to say it. I had a need to design a site, but…what to say? I still struggle with that question. As an artist, I try to intersperse text-based posts with photographs or artwork. And I like to add at least one image to a post, if time permits. My subconscious often leads me to my next post topic.
Thank you to the bloggers who have left comments on my site:
And a note of gratitude to any of my Highland Park buddies who have taken the time to read at least one of my posts, often after I prod them to read a particular post. And thanks to those who have commented ( especially my star commenter).
Seems to me the best way to learn all about blogs is to blog, right?
So Technorati wants me to post this to claim my blog:
Technorati Profile
Leave me comments, so I can learn more about how to handle those…
