This is kinda cool. In case you were wondering about the reading level of this site…

I would very much like the readers here to have a say in this, so please read my comment…

Comment

I’ve now added Textile functionality into the the site. That means that Safari users (like me) can now do neat stuff like bold text, italics and – whee – colors. Here’s a cool reference for the markup…

Of course, you could use html, or switch to Firefox, but if Textile is your thing, well, have at it…

Greetings PI readers and authors!

The press release for this will go out first thing in the A.M., but we wanted all of you to be the first to know: Effective immediately, ProgressiveIslam.Org will be merging with Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV). Here’s the official announcement:

So we dropped out for a bit. See, I forgot to hit the button that said “renew”, the one right next to our domain name. Yeah, that one. So, well, yeah. We kinda vanished. For a bit.

Sorry. We’re back, and good for another year. Hooray.

Well, we did it , with no nervous breakdowns, no rending of garments, no ululations of grief. We’re back, and without too many glitches. In fact, only two major glitches stand out, one obvious, the other, not so much.

The first thing you’re going to notice is the addition of some rather funny characters in many of the stories. This is a result of a database dump issue that didn’t translate some of the quotes, etc. into the appropriate HTML code, so the team here will have to go through the stories one by one over a LONG period of time to get them out.

Of course, if the users could help out by editing their own blogs and entries, that would be nice too….:-)

The second thing is that we switched a couple of user ID numbers around. This affects me and Ilan Bashir, as some of the articles listed under Ilan now show up as having been written by me, and vice versa. I will try and get around to attributing these correctly asap.

Now, onto the good stuff.

Our Host shut us down last Friday or Saturday with no warning or explanation. After pursuing the matter through frantic e-mails and concerned conversations on a company message board, we finally heard on Sunday night that we were shut down for "security reasons." Late yesterday the Host put the site back up saying that they had determined that the site had been compromised and used for illegal purposes. They said they found the compromised files. No details were given to us during any stage of the process. I'm sorry I cannot tell you more, but that is because I do not know more.

Thanks for coming back after our long weekend off!

Thanks to the kind folks on the DH Message Board who waited this process out with us and offered helpful suggestions. A shout out to: "sdayman," "anonymous2," "wholly," and "netdcon"!

Since Ali left us, no one has done any of those things that one has to do to keep one's blog hot on the web.  We can't get trackbacks with drupal (oh well), we never link within our blogs to each others posts (this apparantly creates fabber ratings on technorati), we do not scour other web blogs and try to network and all that.  Oy, I've only got so much time in the day.  I also just don't have the emotional energy to care.  That said, the least I can do is claim the blog on technorati and let it do its stuff.  To do that, I need to post this post and make this link.  There, I am done.  Now technorati will sell our site for us, all that.  If anyone here is a Public Relations person with too much time on their hands, seems to grasp our mission, and wants to help out, please lend a hand.  I'm not going to do it.