Yeah, about that Site Maintainance being complete...

Well, it turns out that the result of the server upgrade was not so awesome after all. Upgrading to a faster machine is supposed to in theory make your site perform better but it was not.

There were many issue resolved since my last post that kept the site up and running and quite fast actually, but we are not out of the woods yet. The MyChabad.org login system is still not available and will probabely be off until tomorrow morning as we revolve around servers.

We hope that this should all be resolved by tomorrow. But you never know...

I hope to now be able to post regulary again...

Site Maintenance Complete!

You may have noticed that Chabad.org underwent scheduled maintenance this morning from 7-10 AM EDT. Boruch Hashem, the upgrade is complete and went smoothly with zero downtime during the upgrade. The MyChabad.org login system was turned off during this upgrade platform-wide.

We hope the new hardware will improve the site's scalability for the years to come.

Do Jews Celebrate Halloween?

Unless you live in remote island, we are inudated with Halloween advertising and themes wherever we turn. What do we tell our children about this? How can they be proud of their own Jewish culture without feeling left out?

Tzvi Freeman tackles this in his new article about the Jewish version of Halloween.

The Big Debate: Did You Ask To Be Born?

Yanky Tauber's latest article touched off a storm of comments both in support and in disagreement to his position: Before we were born, we chose our lot in life.

Did a handicapped person choose to be that way? Is it because of some special abilities he has? How far does free choice go?

Read the article and check out the comments.

Goodbye, Library!

In another phase of content reorganization, the famous "Library" section has been dismatled and its sections distributed through the site:

• "Library" has been renamed "Bookshelf" and is located in the "Knowledge Base" section, along wth the "Anthologies" section
• "Stories" moves to become a root link
• "Classic Jewish Texts" moves to the popular "Judaism 101" section

Click here for google's cache of the old library, and here for an even older version.

Essensially the whole site is a library, so placing these sections in their appropriate places is a good move, I think. I am sure more people will enjoy the Stories section, now that it gets more visibility.

I hope people will still find the sections they are used to finding in thier old places. Remember when Daily Study was recently moved into Calendar?

Chabad.org in Blogs

So, who mentioned us in blogs?

Check it out...

Posts that contain "chabad.org" per day for the last 90 days.


Posts that contain "www.chabad.org" per day for the last 90 days.


With this blog, I expect that number to go up... :)

New Article: The Reunion

There is a very nice new article called "The Reunion" that describes the reunion of a brother and sister after meany years. Check out the comments that show the impact of the article on the readers...

Home Page Presentation

Our home page has this neat presentation of banners that cycles every few seconds to a new banner. Navigating through those banners has always been done via the two forward/back arrows.

Say you want to jump directly to banner? You now can just click on the number and it wil bring you right there. What do you gain? Not much. But sometimes not being able to click on an element that you think is clickable may make it seem like it does not work. So now it does. :)

Welcome!

Welcome to the unofficial Chabad.org blog! In this blog I hope to highlight some of the new cool tools, content and options available on the premiere Jewish website, Chabad.org and its website platform for Chabad Centers around the world.

Stop by often, bookmark us, get the RSS and other feeds, post your comments and requests, etc.

Enjoy!