I’m very sorry to those of you affected by this, but this evening I made a mistake and accidentally erased a few comments.

My anti-spam plugin had caught a few “good” messages, and I was talking on the phone when I was trying to “de-spam” them. Well, I must have accidentally hit the delete button while I was distracted and lost the messages. There were at least 3, and to make matters worse I know that two of them were very long comments and I was sincerely looking forward to reading them. (One of them was on The Rules of Islamic Wife Beating.)

Again, I apologize and I hope you don’t take it personally or think I was censoring anything on purpose. If you noticed that a comment you posted is not showing up this is why. I would encourage you to try again, although I understand if you decide not to.

John

Some of you may have noticed that earlier today I added a feature in the sidebar that displays the top commenters. There are two little catches to this new feature:

1. You must be registered and logged in when commenting to turn your name into a link to your Web site.
2. You must enter your Web site address in your user profile in order for the link to work.

There is one very special thing about this new feature. The outbound links are normal ones which convey full search engine benefits. People often pay a couple hundred dollars a month to get a link to their site from a site as highly ranked as this one, so I guess you could say that it literally pays to be active here!
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Good Morning everyone! Today I’ve made a signifigant change to the theme of the blog. I did this for a few reasons, all of which have to do with improving the user experience.

I’ll issue another more complete post later, but in the meantime I’m in the process of de-bugging this theme, so if you run across any issues please drop me a comment here and let me know so I can resolve them quickly.

Also, if you have any suggestions for changes or improvements please make them.

Have you ever been driving down the road and noticed that you were getting to one of those interesting mile markers on the odometer of your car? Like, you look down and it says 9,996 miles and you’re thinking, ‘Wow! I want to watch it roll over to 10,000.’ Then you get distracted doing something else and almost miss it…

Well, that’s what almost happened to me. I was so busy doing other things that I almost missed the fact that this very post is my 500th post!
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Three weeks ago I thanked everyone for their patience after a rough couple of days following a flood of traffic to the server.

At the time I mentioned that I was going to be upgrading to a new server, and also that I was optimizing the code on the site to help pages load faster. Well, I’ve purchased a new mother-of-a-server that is actually twice as big as I was originally planning on, but I’ve hit a snag with migrating the database to the new server.

In the meantime, another of my article’s has hit the front page of Digg and I’m having a very hard time keeping things going. As of 4am today there have already been over 15,000 visitors. This is even more traffic than last time, so I’m anticipating that for the next few days the site might be slow.
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