Thanks to an extremely helpful pointer from Mike, I was able to find and install a highly promising comment spam filter much sooner than I had hoped. So feel free to add comments again. Let's hope this is the last time I ever have to mention this nasty topic.

Sorry, but the spammers have struck back with fierce force. Spamassassin isn't strong enough to fend off the filthy hordes of robots hell-bent on inserting randomized obscenities into this space, so I'm closing the hole completely until I have time to put a more effective filter into place.

In case you hadn't noticed, I've restored the ability to attach comments to these diary entries. Enjoy.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disable the feature that allows you to attach comments to these diary entries for a little while. This ability is being badly abused by horrible nasty people to insert an endless stream of advertisements for their trashy products and services. Since they've suddenly started coming in faster than I can delete them by hand, I'm going to have to modify the program responsible for accepting comments so that it filters out most of the bad stuff with spamassassin. This won't be a difficult change for me to make, but I don't have time to do it before Shabbos, and maybe not even till Monday. So no comments until then.

I've added a few new features for you beloved diary readers. Yesterday, I activated the ability to add your own comments to each entry. I don't know if anyone will actually care to use this, but it was requested by a vocal minority.

I also enabled a mechanism that allows you to automatically get new entries from this diary in your email inbox without having to visit this Web site at all. You just need to ask me, and I'll add you to the list of people who receive these updates. Safta Sari is the first person on this list since her difficulty in reading the Web site was the motivation for this feature.

Finally, to get the above-mentioned email feature to work the way I wanted, I enabled an RSS 2.0 feed in addition to the RSS 0.91 feed that was already available. If you don't know what RSS is, it's a way to get information from a source that provides new pieces of information on a regular basis (for example, a news publisher) without having to manually check a Web site to see whether or not any new information has been published. A good RSS reader (like RSSOwl) can aggregate the information provided by all your favorite news sources, providing you with a convenient way to read what you want without wasting time on things you've already read. Recent versions of well-maintained Web browsers like Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari also include features for working with Web sites that provide information through RSS.