OrthodoxNet.com Blog

Some good ones here.

Directions to Orthodoxy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/directionstoorthodoxy/

Including Jim Forest’s archives
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/

Recently I was interviewed on a variety of current topics. The interview is making its way around the internet. You can read it on the Peter and Helen Evans site.

I (your moderator, webmaster, and all around good guy) am going to S. Carolina today. Barring a storm or some other delay (flying), I will be back tomorrow evening. Be good.

Yesterday the site was moved to a new server. Today that server had problems and the site was down for a while. During the downtime it got moved to a different server, which happens to be one of the fastest at my web hosting company. Nice turn of events actually. The site moves along at a good clip. A few postings were lost (they had to use a backup) but not a bad trade-off for the improvement in speed. Again, my web host has great customer service and I recommend them if you are looking for a hosting service. Addaction.net

My web host is moving the site to a different server at midnight tonight. Tomorrow all the sluggishness and long load times should be over.

Jim Jatras will be on the Don Kroah Show on Monday evening, 17 July at 6:00 p.m. EDT

Jim is an attorney at the Venable law firm in Washington, DC. For many years Jim was a policy analyst for the Republican Leadership in the US Senate, and before that served as a diplomat with the State Department. On Monday, he will be on the Don Kroah Show to talk about Kosovo. It seems that a lot of people here may have forgotten about Kosovo but that doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. In fact, it’s getting a lot worse. As Jim will tell us, Kosovo’s Orthodox Christian Serbian community — of which Jim is the authorized representative — is facing extinction at the hands of a violent jihad movement if Kosovo is detached from Serbia and made an independent country.

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I leave this morning for Nashville, TN to attend the Clergy-Laity Congress next week. We are leaving a little earlier for a short vacation which will include visiting the NASA space center in Huntsville, AL, perhaps Selma, AL for the civil rights movement history, and Andrew Jackson’s house in Nashville itself. I’ll be checking in intermittently, more frequently once we get to Nashville. I broke down and finally bought a digital camera. If the pictures are good, I’ll post some.

Salvo is a new magazine that is “dedicated to debunking the cultural myths that have undercut human dignity, all but destroyed the notions of virtue and morality, and slowly eroded our appetite for transcendence. It also seeks to recover the one worldview that actually works.”

Take a look at their site. It looks very promising. I signed up for a subscription yesterday.

It seems that the more visitors a blog gets, the more spammers try to hitch a ride. In the last month, I erased over 58,240 spam messages — most caught by an excellent filter. Without the filter, the messages would have been posted rendering the site unusable.

At the same time, some of you have had to wait to see you messages posted. That get’s a bit frustrating I know, but please be patient with it. There are some ways around this such as requiring all users to log on for example, but I’m reluctant to introduce those measures since apart from the wait, things seem to be working well.

Ed. Passed on by a reader…

On May, cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sale calls. YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS! The telemarketers will eat up your free minutes and end up costing you money in the long run.

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888/382-1222. You have to be calling from the phone you want blocked. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It blocks your number for five (5) years.

National Do Not Call Registry www.donotcall.gov You can do it here also.

I (your moderator) will be in Minneapolis until Wednesday. I fly out this afternoon and return to Naples next Tuesday afternoon. I’ll have opportunity to check in now and then. JBL will be handling the back room chores. If your post does not appear right away, have patience. He will get to it. (Posts are not moderated but some get tangled in the spam queue and sometimes it takes a while to sort it all out.)

I’m helping with a youth Lenten retreat. See you on Sunday.

You can post again. Sorry about the problem.

It’s called a Captcha and it is supposed to stop spambots. What’s a spambot? A program (spam-robot) that puts links to commercial sites into the comment box. Spambots are designed and launched into cyberspace by nefarious webmasters and other evil-doers. Google indexes OrthodoxyToday.org daily. The more links a site has, the higher that site appears in the Google search pages. Spambots can’t read the numbers so most (but not all) spam comments are stopped dead in their tracks. Is this really a problem? Yes. In the last two months alone I deleted over 15,000 spam comments. Since I added the Captcha, the spam comments have been reduced to about 50 a day.

I think I found the problem why your posts always end up in the moderation queue (the spam catcher). Hopefully they will sail through now.

I will be gone through Wednesday evening attending our annual Lenten clergy retreat. I will try to check in, but since the only access is dial-up I may not make it. Be good.

Hope you like the new look. Behind it is an update of Wordpress, a different them which means cleaner code, and a few bells and whistles that will reduce some of the comment spam (which you don’t see but gets trapped and needs to be cleaned out, etc.) and other things. I wanted to reduce the clutter and crowding of the old blog and think it succeeds for the most part.

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NBC program mocking Christ’s crucifixion to be aired on the day before (western) Good Friday.

http://www.afa.net/nbcspecialalert.asp.

Mark Stricherz, a writer and reporter in Washington, D.C. started the blog In Front of Your Nose — A Catholic and Populist Review of Politics and Culture. You will find clear thinking and intelligence. It’s worth a look.

The March for Life was impressive, particularly the large number of young people, teens and college students in particular, that attended. I was surprised to see this even though I have been reading how more and more young people are pro-life. People attended from all over the country of course, and the Orthodox had a sizeable contigent, maybe 50 or 60 people. St. Tikhon’s Seminary sent students along with the Dean of seminary. Chicago sent the most people I think. Met. Herman of the OCA attended as well as Bp. Mark.

Met. Herman is an established figure at the March I learned since he has participated from the beginning. He was a featured speaker at the beginning of the march along with other notables. The day began with a prayer service in the Senate office building which included Terri Schiavo’s father as speaker. Fr. Frank Pravone, one of the most prominent pro-life leaders in the country, led the service.

I didn’t attend because I was invited to the “Bloggers for Life” meeting at the Family Research Council. The Washington Post sent a reporter to the event who asked me some questions afterward. She included some of my comments in an article that appeared on Tuesday: Protesters See Mood Shift Against ‘Roe’.

I don’t know how many people were there but it took almost three hours to walk the mall. The Orthodox traditionally break off to hold a small prayer service that Met. Herman led. Most leave at that point. Someone told me today the press reported that 70,000 attended but it sure seemed like more were there. I haven’t seen any official counts yet.

I took a lot of pictures that I will post in the next day or two.