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{ Category Archives } Judaism

Formatting the Torah

The Torah as traditionally written has two kinds of paragraph breaks: "open" and "closed". Open paragraphs are the same as in English typography: the next paragraph starts on the next line. Closed paragraphs start the next paragraph on the same line, after a 9-em gap. In the image on the page linked to above, there […]

Minor update to flexcal

Updated flexcal to 1.2.1; nothing major, just changed the Hebrew numbers to use the technically correct Unicode code points HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERESH (׳ ׳) and HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERSHAYIM (״ ״) rather than single and double quotes. Also similarly updated the Hebrew keyboard.

Creative Commons Ketubah and Tenaim Texts

This doesn't belong in a programming blog, but I wanted this out there on the web. I recently had a need for the Hebrew text of the traditional marriage documents, the ketubah and tenaim, and was very surprised that they are nowhere to be found, at least with my Google-fu. So I transcribed them and […]

Updated flexcal

For those following this, I corrected some typos (חשון spelled wrong; numbers should not use the סופית form) in the Hebrew calendar. flexcal now stands at version 1.2

Improved hebrewkeyboard

Now that sendkeys is fixed to work with contenteditable and I've analyzed Lebedev's VirtualKeyboard to allow typing on the physical keyboard, updating the hebrewKeyboard plugin was straightforward. I had to learn a fair amount about the difference between keyup, keydown, and keypress events, but I think everything works. Check it out!

New Hebrew Keyboard

One downside of the virtual keyboard is that it takes over the physical keyboard, so that typing is in the language of the virtual keyboard. This is often an advantage, but I usually want to mix Hebrew and English text. So I modified the program to track the Caps Lock key: if the caps lock […]

Jewish History from a Unique Perspective

My children's Jewish history teacher, Rabbi Yonason Goldson has been teaching at Block Yeshiva High School for many years and presents Jewish history with a mix of traditional and scholarly sources, always from a Torah-true perspective and always looking at the broad sweep of history and the Jews' role in it. He has now published […]

New UI widgets: textpopup and hebrewKeyboard

Last modified 2011-10-28; added box option The Hebrew pop-up keyboard on the YI site search box was always hard-coded and kind of obtrusive, so I wanted to make a jQuery plugin to add a keyboard to any input type="text" or textarea. To make it more flexible, I factored it into a general-purpose popup widget and […]

Google maps mapping tool

To make the eruv map, someone had to enter all the individual points of the eruv boundary. That someone was Mickey Ariel (thanks!). To make it possible, I wrote a simple web application that contains a Google map and placs a marker at every mouse click. Each marker has a number, and the list of […]

The Hebrew keyboard

For those who liked the YI Hebrew keyboard, I wrote a similar keyboard that I use to turn Hebrew into HTML entities (for the website), and, at my kids' request, uses Morfix dictionary and Google Israel to translate or search for Hebrew terms. Enjoy!