For those who don't know me on Babka... when I'm not obsessing about my synagogue's proposed merger with another (and seriously, that eats up so much time), or my day job, or my life as a father and husband... I'm a brewer.

Actually, to be honest, I'm a Certified Cicerone®. It's the beer equivalent of a certified sommelier, and a certification that roughly five thousand people in the world hold. I don't do it as part of my day-job, but rather because I enjoy it... and as part of the studying to get the credential, I learned to homebrew so I'd understand the beer production process.

At this point, I'm cranking out about 18-20 batches a year - each batch yields about 2 cases - and having fun playing with different styles and variations on past successful recipes. And you're going, "T.J., what does this have to do with the audience here on Rugela?"

Half the fun of brewing is coming up with stupid names for beers.

There's my international dark lager called "Get the Golem".

An ordinary bitter (a British style) called "Tsurrus".

My dark mild (another British style) called "Nebbish".

I'm currently fermenting a Scotch Ale (a 'Wee Heavy') called... MacGroggers, which should weigh in at about 8.5% ABV and will keep till Purim.

And, when it gets a hint colder here (since I don't have temperature control for my fermentation), I'll make a Czech dark lager called "The Maharal's Monster".

The best part is that all these competitions I send beers generally have no idea where the names come from. I have to wonder what they think when they google the names...

It's nearly Shabbat and that means it's time again for a Rugela bake! For those of you who are new, this is something I do every week to talk about the changes to the site.

One of the developers is on vacation this week so it's been a bit of a light week, but I still have some exciting changes to talk about.

Stories and Comments

• Seeing who Starred a Post- You can now see who starred a post on the post. It's right on the context bar!
• Seeing who Starred a Comment- You can now see who starred a comment by clicking on the number of stars on the comment.
• More Stories by- If you're on a story and the author has written other posts, you can see a selection of them on the side
• Improved Display of Deep Threads- We found in testing that if replies became very deep, they could go further than a phone screen. That can't happen anymore, and similarly we've improved deep replies on wider screens too.
• The Edited Line- On a story or Post we show the time the it was made. We now show an * and if you hover it, you can see when the last edit was made.
• Colors- We tweaked the color of the context bar so it's a bit easier on the eyes.

Markup and Composing

• Hidden text- On posts, you can add a content label so people who don't want to see something potentially upsetting won't see it but we didn't have a solution to comments. Now we do! You can use the new || syntax in Markdown to hide text. And better yet, if you put something in brackets after that, like ||[warning] Some hidden text||, then the warning will show up for the person. That covers everything from upsetting content to spoilers and more. And this syntax is covered in the formatting sidebar when you write a post.
• Previews- It used to be that when you wrote a post or comment, you'd have to submit it to see how it would look, which meant that if you wanted to change how it looked, you'd have to edit it. Now we have a Preview tab next to the Write tab, so you can preview how your post or comment will look before it goes up.

Search

• Spelling Suggestions- If your search doesn't find anything, the search now suggests similar spellings, eg Hanukkah for Hanukah
• Search and Content Filters- We now apply your content filters by default, and you can turn that off with a checkbox
• Look and Feel- We made some small tweaks to the look and feel of the search bar and search results.

Link previews

• More Images- We had some trouble with some site's images getting into previews. We've fixed that where we can.
• More sites- We've improved Rugela's ability to get link previews generally.

Misc

• Filters - We renamed the "Content preferences" settings tab to "Filters". We think that's easier to find/read.
• Legal Document Versioning- We'll occasionally need to update our legal documents with new versions. For example, this week we updated the privacy notice about search. We offer each version of our legal documents for transparency.
• Speed Improvements- We've made a few speed improvements across the site.

What do you think?

What's your favorite new feature? Do you like the new preview system? Do you like the hidden text feature?

What's something you wish was a little different?

Reply below with your thoughts! Or as always, you can send your feedback to suggestions@rugela.com!

Hello people, I’m Miri. I’m on the fediverse via a small professionally-oriented server run by a friend. Not on Babka for that reason, and so I’m especially eager to see what this place might become. Thanks, @serge, for making it. I think we really need it.

Wow this is a really nice posting interface.

It's nice to finally be able to move over here from the Fediverse. The other place I've been kind of hanging out is the new community from Ark Media called The Fold, and that's been nice too. I'm still looking at Mastodon sort of for now, but if Serge decides to retire Babka I can't say I blame him.

In other news, videos from this year's Oud Festival are starting to come out so maybe I'll post some of those here.

Honestly, I’ve never regretted putting on tefillin. So maybe I should do it more. I mostly have trouble sustaining habits.

Alon Shaya’s Safta’s Table, an Israeli-inspired neighbourhood café in New Orleans, has been awarded a Bib Gourmand in the 2026 Michelin Guide American South, just seven months after opening.

I play mah jongg. I teach mah jongg. I have strong opinions about mah jongg tiles. I’ve also become an avid needlepointer, with an ever-growing collection of canvases, an alarming investment in colorful threads and more than a few opinions about both. Somewhere along the way, my free time became devoted to what the internet has affectionately dubbed “granny hobbies.”

“It connected me to other people that were very instrumental to my broader Yiddish interests,” said Lana Adler, a 2013 Hampshire graduate who went on to work at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which houses the largest collection of Yiddish-language works in the world. “It was an incredibly important space for Yiddish.”

What ever happened to the Dat protocol? It seemed like it was going so strong and now there’s this confusing site about everything but the protocol.

Howdy y'all, I just wanted to say hi and thanks for having me! You might know me as @em@babka.social. I'm most often a lurker on social media, but since there's nothing telling me what I should post here, I'm doing this!

Thinks I'm currently thinking a lot about:

• building a DnD one shot campaign for my friends
• writing a shiur on kabbalah + hanukkah for my shul
• making our house more cozy / beautiful

nice to see / meet y'all

We deserve nice things.

(CW for food b/c alcohol and dinner mentions)
Yesterday, I went to a wedding and took Jamie along. Jamie didn't know anyone there but me, and I only knew three other people: the bride, the groom, and the rabbi. And, of course, those are the three people you don't really get to spend much time talking to at a wedding!

But it was an absolutely wonderful, fun, joyful experience. Watching the ceremony under the chuppah, looking at the ketubah, and just seeing how much the bride was smiling. Allison was SO happy. The love and affection were just contagious. It was beautiful.

We also got to meet a bunch of their friends from faraway lands, particularly Texas. A lot of them were college friends, and I ended up fielding quite a few questions about Judaism, which was interesting and fun.

I'd actually met some of them at synagogue the day before, which led to a particularly funny exchange.

The rabbi had called a bunch of people over for l'chaims, and this young woman named Judy, probably in her mid-20s, exclaimed, "Allison! I LOVE this synagogue!"

Naturally, a few minutes later I wandered over and asked, "So, I heard you say you love this synagogue. Is that because you haven't been to many synagogues before, or because this one is particularly different?"

She explained that she'd grown up Southern Baptist, and they would NEVER have had alcohol at something like that!

Anyway, everyone was having a wonderful time, and I think they really appreciated being able to ask questions about Judaism, explore things they were curious about, and show genuine interest without anyone trying to recruit them.

And I loved the dancing! Although, to be fair, my feet had been hurting since cocktail hour, so by the time dinner and dancing rolled around, they were already pretty sore. Apparently, standing around socializing is harder on my feet than I'd like to admit!

It was just a lovely weekend, full of joy, affection, curiosity, and people enjoying one another's company. And a very happy bride. I really can't overstate how wonderful it was to see her smiling so much.