YUTOPIA

We've been nominated for the Jewish Blog Award for "Best Anti-Establishment Blog as well as for our coverage of the Conservative teshuvot on homosexuality. It seems to be an open voting (read: popularity) contest which given the open nomination process needs to be conducted in rounds.
Anyway, if you'd like to vote for YUTOPIA and give me the opportunity to add another snazzy graphic to the sidebar, you can start with the best in class voting (the best post and series voting is not open yet).
I'll post updates as needed.

In a move sure to placate literally tens of people, I have removed the TypeKey requirement for commenting on the blog. As an alternative, all you need to do is enter the name of this blog (case insensitive) in the supplied field and your comment will be posted automatically. Otherwise you will not see an error, but your comment will be labeled as "junk" and will likely been discarded with the blog-spam. If you were one of the few who registered, your TypeKey account will still work and will let you bypass the filter.
Hopefully people will find this mechanism to be less intrusive than having to register with TypeKey.
Thanks again go out to Shaya for the plugin installation.

Dear Loyal Readers,
I am very pleased to announce that we have just won our first J-Blog award! YUTOPIA is a Silver Winner in the "Best Jewish Culture Blog" category because apparently if there's anything I know it's Jewish culture.
In all honestly I have no idea how these things work especially since I'm not sure I'd put 2006 as one of my best blogging years (a 5 year retrospective will be forthcoming around May). In the meantime I must thank the newly redesigned Town Crier for the initial nomination and now I get to add this snappy little graphic to the sidebar:

Dear Loyal Readers,
Some of you may remember my attending an O.A.R. concert at MSG last year. This Saturday night at 8:00 O.A.R is once again playing MSG, but this time I have *two* tickets since I thought it would probably be more fun to go with someone else this time around.
So here's the deal: I'm looking for someone to come with me and occupy Section 2 Row R Seat 3 or 4. Ideally, someone who is be easygoing, genuinely cool1, and appreciate O.A.R. or at least that type of music.2 Not knowing the legal ramifications, I'm hesitant to announce this as an official contest but anyone interested should either leave a comment or e-mail - proxies on behalf of others are accepted as well - and I'll select a "non-winner" later in the week.

1. To provide much needed balance
2. Folk/Rock/Indie/Reggae. Or you can go to their website for samples.

Much to my dismay I recently discovered that this blog has been plagiarized. Specifically, my post The Mind Of A Matchmaker has been reproduced here1, links intact, indicating that the "Admin" actually copied and posted the HTML source code. That's it.
No link back, no byline. Zip.

I feel like Metallica (and not in the good way).
Folks, this blog is published under a very reasonable license which really isn't that difficult to follow. The basic gist is that anyone is free to reproduce this blog provided:

1. There is proper attribution
2. The reproduction is for a non-commercial purposes
3. You don't make derivative works from it

I haven't had a problem with this until now since whenever this blog has been used I've been quoted and people have asked permission (which I've granted every time I can remember). When I found the post in question I immediately e-mailed the following to the Admin.

Dear Admin,
My name is R. Josh Yuter and run the blog YUTOPIA. recently came across your post here:
http://bitachon.com/forums/jewish-dating/164-the-mind-of-matchmaker.html
Which was copied unattributed from one of my earlier blog posts here:
http://yutopia.yucs.org/archives/2004/07/the_mind_of_a_m.html
I publish my blog under creative commons license which allows for reproduction of content, provided attribution is given:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/
That said I will not request removal of your post, but would ask for the proper attribution and link back to the original post.
Thanks and Shana Tova
Josh

Thus far, no reply.
I have a shiur I need to write up on copyright law in halakha, but regardless of any potential issurim it's just so simple to comply with the license that violations are very frustrating.

1. I know by linking there I am directing traffic to them, but the example is well worth it.

I noticed recently that after the site update that one of the RSS feeds is no longer updated. If you're into this sort of thing, please update your RSS bookmarks to either http://yutopia.yucs.org/index.xml or http://yutopia.yucs.org/atom.xml.

Welcome back to the new and improved YUTOPIA!
I finally have most of the site in working order, including the Jewish Guitar Chords Archive. Search is currently down, but I'll have to talk to Shaya about that. If you're wondering, I'm using a heavily modified version of Lilia Ahner's Stevenson style. The new layout and templates should help page loads. The code is certainly cleaner, with valid XHTML and valid CSS.
I'll probably be making some smaller cosmetic changes as I notice all the new quirks. If you happen to find any problems or would like to offer helpful suggestions, please let me know.

Dear Loyal Readers,
Sometime over the weekend, I'm going to be making some major updates to the back-end of the site. Although we moved to a newer version of MovableType some time ago I didn't have the time to reset templates to take full advantage of all the features. Also, this will likely entail a change in the design, which in my opinion is long overdue. Hopefully I won't mess things up too badly, but don't be surprised if things appear a little messy at some point. Also I hope to get to writing some more including my thoughts on Edah's demise and a few other things about which I have been thinking.

Because I've been getting swamped with with spam posts, I've tried setting up MoveableType's spam filtering. Of course, one such attempt resulted in my deleting all past comments, but those were thankfully recovered.
The setup now is that in order for comments to be posted, I need to approve them (yes I know the post-comment-submit page is horrid, I'll get to that eventually). The thing is that many loyal readers were somehow flagged as "banned" commenters such that I didn't even get an e-mail alerting me that these comments needed my approval. This meant that many legitimate and even insightful comments submitted over the past few weeks never got published. This has now been corrected.
I hope things will go a little more smoothly now, and many apologies for the delay.

To all remaining loyal readers:
In my attempts at despamming the blog it appears I have deleted all previous comments. This of course, really stinks. Unlike many blogs out there I took pride in having the fewest nonsensical flame wars (the Edah post was a notable exception) and having one of the most articular and/or humerous commenters in the J-Blog world or otherwise.
I have the static pages backed up and I can start putting comments back slowly but believe it or not there were about 860ish in total so it'll take some time. I could just put back the comments with the more serious discussions or if anyone out there wants to write a script and help me out, that would be great.
At any rate, please don't be offended since this was completely unintentional.
Josh