Brainripples

One of the hardest things to do is to take a project for which one had high hopes and give up on it.

Today, I'm sad to announce that the Dafcast project is on "indefinite hiatus."( Cut for length ) I'm not deleting the website yet, but unless someone else wants to take it on, this is probably not a case of "Hadran Alach" -- "We will return to you."

I thank the handful of volunteers who submitted translations and comments over the last few years. I thank those who supported me in my original vision. I thank those who helped me face the reality that this was not a good use of my time and talents.

And I look forward to learning Daf Yomi in cycle 13, and hope to make it through all 2,711 pages this time.

So for the past few months I've been working on rethinking the Dafcast website. And I'd like a sanity check here, folks. ( Cut for length )

To help me find ideas for my dvar Torah, I downloaded the entire Talmud Bavli from Mechon Mamre and wrote a Python script to compile an index of biblical citations in the Bavli. This might be useful to others, so here's the link. Edited: Mechon-Mamre has graciously given permission, so you may now forward the link. There's also now a PDF version.

If you are the kind of person who is interested in this sort of thing, I'd love your feedback on how I can make it more useful.

I've finally gotten around to posting the file format instructions for Dafcast.net, so if that's what's been holding you back from volunteering, you have no more excuses. :-)

Due to various changes, I need to once again re-prioritize and re-schedule my big projects. Here's the new list:

1. Finish editing KabShab. This should take me another one or two nights of intensive work, and then a few days of touchup. New goal: Finish by Feb. 21. Once that's done, the new project will be producing a demo recording, which I hope to finish by June 1.

2. Next round of edits on my siddur. Realistically, this is going to take a month or so, and we're heading into the period of Pesach prep. I'll do what I can as I can, but I no longer think it's reasonable to assume this will be done before Pesach, so (alas) I'm going to push the deadline out to Apr. 30.

3. Resurrecting the Dafcast. Every few months I get a nice note about how useful the pages that are already there are, and I really should get back into it. I'm going to try to get back to doing two or three dapim a week, as an ongoing target along with everything else. I will try to finish up Megillah, but it would also be great to get the missing dapim from Pesachim, Chapter 10 done before Pesach. I also note that with the Daf Yomi starting Sanhedrin today, we've got Makkot coming up on June 6, and it would be awesome to have the 22 pages of Makkot translated (or, even better, turned into podcasts) before Daf Yomi gets there. (Anyone want to take on some of the translation?)

In the continuing saga of too many irons in the fire at once....

Last summer I started the Dafcast, my project to prepare an open translation of the Talmud with an accompanying podcast. Long-time readers of this blog are aware of the ups and downs of that project.

When I started, I was able to register dafcast.net and dafcast.org, but dafcast.com was taken. It seemed dormant, but whatever.

I got a bunch of spam over the weekend from domain name poaching companies telling me that, as the owner of dafcast.net and dafcast.org, I'd probably be interested to know that dafcast.com had lapsed and was about to become available. Knowing enough about the domain registration process, and secure in my belief that there wasn't going to be a lot of demand for this domain, I didn't respond to those emails, but starting at 2pm today I tried registering dafcast.com through 1and1.com, my regular service provider.

At 2:30 it became available, I grabbed it, and the DNS has propagated. The Dafcast, in all its humble glory, is now equally available in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains.

Gee, all I need now is to get back to generating content.

So I hope those of you who were interested kept going even when I forgot to post reminder links. :-) Seriously, the translations through 106 are on dafcast.net, and if you were doing a page a day you would have run out by now. And the next bunch of pages remain on the tangent of kiddush and havdalah --- an important tangent, but the point here is to enrich our sedarim.

So I have jumped ahead and just posted daf 114. And I learned something (or, since I did this a few years ago, I'll assume that I re-learned something that I had forgotten) about the answer to the third of the four questions.

( On all other nights, we don't dip our food even once. On this night, why do we dip twice? )

I realized that even though I've been putting these behind lj-cuts, for those who read my blog through an RSS reader they're still getting the full text of each page. Since my translations are posted over on the Dafcast anyway, for those who are joining me on this page-a-day-until-Passover journey, today we're up to Pesachim 103, which starts a digression on the subject of Havdallah.

Enjoy!