BuzzMachine

Wiki wish

: I wish someone would put up a wiki for the collective blogosphere to fact-check, fisk, confirm — whatever — Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 now that it’s set to be released this month.

Assvertising

: Rent your rear.

Vote Al Jazeera

: Blogging from the World Editors Forum quotes Hazem Saghieh, editor of Al Hayat in London:

Al Jazeera “has partly replaced and taken over the role of political parties in the Middle East. Al Jazeera is the most influential party in the Arabic World”, he said. This development has been helped by technological advances and the decline of traditional political parties in the region, Saghieh explained. “Al Jazeera claims that US military destroyed its offices in Kabul and Baghdad and an Al Jazeera correspondent in Madrid was accused of having helped Arabic terrorists. That is typical for a political party”, Saghieh said.

Revenge of the youth

: A letter writer in my town’s local, fuddy-duddy, weekly newspaper went onto Xanga to see what these kids today are up to and came back shouting there’s trouble, right here in River City! It starts with B and ends with G and rhymes with, uh, agog!

But thanks to the wonders of online interactivity, the kids fought back. [Link via my son; I'm not including names of kids, schools, or towns in this.] First, the letter writer:

What is wrong with today

New Kurdish blog

: Here’s a new Kurdish blog from Iran by Medya Ghazizadeh and, best of all, lots of photos.

Help

: For some reason, no one can post comments. Not my doing. Anybody know what the heck could have happened???? Here’s the story:

Suddenly, my blog is accepting no comments. When someone tries to submit a comment, they get this message:

“Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: You are not allowed to post comments. Please correct the error in the form below, then press POST to post your comment.”

Comments are OPEN in default and in each post I try. This is happening only in my main Buzzmachine blog; tested in another blog and it works.

Made a small change in comment configuration and rebuilt to try to fix it; didn’t work.

I changed nothing on the server.

However, last night, my host (Hosting Matters) went down and I believe that happened just as I was closing comments on ONE POST (a very old one) to deal with a comment spammer.

Help! What can I do?

: UPDATE: Just fixed it. When banning a comment spammer last night, I managed to submit a blank line to the banned IP list — thus, everyone was banned. Thus, the silence.

They should all be so easy.

Comments open again. But all of you who thought, “Oh, man, I guess I went too far and he’s banned me” …