Entries from October 2008 ↓

Blogrolling.com still experiencing outages

Problems being worked on as of 9:30pm EST 10/16/08

1389 Blog reported earlier that the popular Blogrolling.com link list server site was hacked by Islamists. Since that time, the site’s home page has gone offline repeatedly, and the blogrolls hosted on the site are being served only intermittently.

Status updates from blogrolling on Twitter

Because Blogrolling obviously can’t use its own site to provide status updates, the Blogrolling staff has set up a blogrolling user ID on Twitter. As long as the main Blogrolling.com site is down, it will redirect automatically to the Twitter page, which will display status updates. You can follow it from your own Twitter user ID if you wish.

H/T to Texas Fred for this information.

Doctor Bulldog reports pro-Obama censorship on BlogTalkRadio, and explains what you can do about it:

Obama’s Truth Squads Censor Free Speech on BlogTalkRadio

An unpleasant surprise

Earlier today, I accessed Blogrolling to add some entries to “1389′s Links.” This list appears in the 1389 Blog sidebar, and it offers a whole variety of links to sites that I find interesting, informative, or entertaining, and that readers might like to see also.

This is what came up:

Needless to say, I made no effort to contact ejder2121@windowslive.com.

What is Blogrolling anyway?

How you can use it

Many bloggers and blog readers have seen lists of links to other blogs that are hosted and maintained through a service called Blogrolling. This service offers a home page that lets you open an account, set up and populate your own blogrolls and link lists, and generate Javascript code to display the link lists on your blog or website. You can distribute this Javascript code so that others can display shared blogrolls on their sites. For example, 1389 Blog maintains a shared blogroll for the Stop Blog Censorship campaign, which you can see in the sidebar.

Advantages and disadvantages

Blogrolling has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall, I’m a big fan of it, because of its convenience, stability, and ease of use. It has features for sorting blogrolls by most recent blog update, for searching blogrolls, for finding out who has blogrolled you, and for backing up blogroll links. On the other hand, because Blogrolling uses Javascript to build the link lists for display on your page, Google will not index the the links, and will not use the links to raise the page rank of the blogs on the list. And if you put too many blogrolls on the same page, it will introduce delays in loading the page, especially for readers without broadband service. That is why most of our blogrolls have been moved to the Links resource page.

Why would anybody hack Blogrolling?

That’s a good question.

Blogrolling is simply a hosting service for link lists, open to both commercial and noncommercial sites. To the best of my knowledge, Blogrolling takes no political, religious, or ideological stance.

Yes, it’s true that some conservative, antijihadist, pro-Christian, and pro-Jewish blogs and blog groups use Blogrolling – to name a few: Center for Vigilant Freedom, Bear Flag League, The Hillbilly Ecosystem, Screw the UN, International Zionist Web, The Tennessee ConserVOLiance, Christian Blogosphere, Right Truth, and the Crescent of Betrayal Blogburst.

So is that why the Blogrolling site was hacked? Most unlikely! Not only are there plenty of sites on Blogrolling that hold views that oppose ours, but also, it is clear that the vast majority of sites that use Blogrolling are commercial blogs that express no particular point of view either for or against the Islamist agenda.

So what would be the point of hacking Blogrolling?

Maybe there was no real point, or at least no point that would make any sense. Maybe the miscreant(s) were motivated simply by a desire to prove that they have the ability to make nuisances of themselves by interfering with a site that many people use. To be sure, that’s not much of an accomplishment. It takes a lot less talent and ability to break in and mess up a web page than it takes to create and run a good site. Blogrolling will most likely notify the authorities and then get their site up and running again with enhanced security. And what will people think who happen to see the hacked site? They’ll most likely be inclined to feel more negatively toward jihadism, Islam, and Muslims in general than they already do.

We all have them…

Being on the receiving end of anger and hate seems to be an inescapable part of the human condition. At any moment, somebody out there may harbor ill will toward us. Sometimes it is for reasons we can understand, sometimes not.

I remember a classmate in college telling me that he had sat down at a table to study, and a girl, with whom he was not acquainted, had scowled at him and moved away. His complaint was that he wanted everybody to like him, and he was bothered by the fact that a complete stranger had turned up her nose at him. I told him, “Well, that’s too bad, but it’s impossible to get everyone in the whole world to like you. That’s just the way life is!”

Sometimes the hostility is expected. We got a death threat or two from the articles about Geert Wilders’ Fitna movie, but we figure that just goes with the territory. Anybody who expresses an opinion or takes a stand is liable to stir up some anger and hatred. On the other hand, those who never express an opinion may be accused of spinelessness, sloth, or stupidity. So it’s impossible to make a favorable impression on everybody.

Enemies versus the human spirit

We cannot afford to let our enemies define who we are.

Whether we choose our enemies or they choose us, we can still be in a boatload of spiritual trouble, often without realizing it. I was unable to determine where the following quotation comes from; it may perhaps be from Lao Tzu. Be that as it may, its truth is all too often borne out by the record of human history:

Choose your enemies carefully, because you will become more and more like them.

Spiritual survival

This may surprise many readers, but the traditions of the Orthodox Christian Church include prayer “for those who hate us.” The following is from page 23 of A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 1991.

Prayers for Our Enemies

Troparion
Thou who didst pray for them that crucified thee, O Lord, lover of the souls of men, and who didst command thy servants to pray for their enemies, forgive those who hate and maltreat us, and turn our lives from all harm and evil to brotherly love and good works: for this we humbly bring our prayer, that with one accord and one heart we may glorify thee who alone lovest mankind.

Kontakion
As thy first martyr Stephen prayed to thee for his murderers, O Lord, so we fall before thee and pray: forgive all who hate and maltreat us and let not one of them perish because of us, but all be saved by thy grace, O God the all-bountiful.