garden report

I didn't take pictures today. The garden looks much like it did last week: there are still green tomatoes and young green peppers. The ones that were there last week are bigger; there are some new small tomatoes and two tiny new peppers. I imagine I'm a couple weeks away from harvesting any of that (and that's assuming the tomato thief lets me).

The basil plants have been producing leaves that are thinner and less lush than they were at the beginning of the season. Perhaps harvesting basil helps the plant (pruning) and isn't just for when I want to eat it, so today I harvested a bunch and made pesto. I understand that one can freeze basil, but I've not had much success with that in the past. I might try again. I might also dry some.

The rosemary got a slow start but is doing well now. I've been using it fresh too but might end up drying some. It doesn't look like the plant cares whether I cut some off or leave it alone, so I think I can do that toward the end of the season.

new Codidact communities

I am delighted by how well things are going on the Judaism community on Codidact. We have a lot of active people and interesting questions. I have my people back. And in time we'll broaden our activities; there are discussions of an on-site blog (for torah commentary) and a dictionary or wiki of Jewish and halachic terms and concepts. We've also integrated with Sefaria, the big online collection of sources, which is cool and produces bidirectional links.

Paging Dr. Whom and other linguists: Languages & Linguistics is a new site and currently has questions about Hebrew, Arabic, a comparison between Arabic and Chinese, English, and (language-agnostic) linguistic concepts.

People have been asking us for a programming site for a while. Friday we launched Software Development, which has a slow start so far presumably because of the weekend. We wouldn't normally launch on a Friday, but this was the best timing for the SRE-type who would be keeping an eye on things for the first few days. Its scope is broad; we're planning for spin-offs from the start but we're starting with one big tent rather than creating specialized communities that struggle more to achieve critical mass.

Now we have to get the word out. I have a draft of the next newsletter for our mailing list, so that should go out soon.

(Our other communities: Writing, Outdoors, Photography & Video, Scientific Speculation, Cooking, Electrical Engineering, and the "town hall", Meta.)