A "Google Books" for Seforim

Imagine having an entire library of over 45,000 Seforim at your fingertips - fully searchable, fully downloadable, and completely free. Fortunately for our generation, HebrewBooks.org will provide anyone with exactly that, in an awesome-looking, solid webapp.

HebrewBooks.org (a.k.a. The Society for Preservation of Hebrew Books) is a non-profit organization, who's self-proclaimed goal is to "bring to life the many Seforim that were written and unfortunately forgotten, and to make all Torah Publications free and ubiquitous." They have also recently launched a smaller side-project for hosting manuscripts online at HebrewManuscripts.org.

Finding seforim on the site is generally easy, with the provided search and browse options. You can search both by title and author, and even for specific words contained in the seforim (more on that soon). They even have a convenient virtual Hebrew keyboard next to the input boxes, for those who don't know how to type in Hebrew.

The books are all available in original, scanned PDFs. Additionally, each sefer has been OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processed so that it's fully searchable. The seforim that were scanned may not be in the best of quality, and as-such, OCR can understandably be inaccurate. However, I've found that it's quite useful for the most part.

So try it today. You won't be disappointed.

StackOverflow for Judaism

I'm a real big fan of StackOverflow, the place where programmers get to ask questions about pretty much anything programming-realted. There have been loads of times where I was stuck on a real messy programming problem, with no easy way out. A quick post on StackOverflow, and boom, I got the solution.

So, it's super-exciting to see how that same technology is now being used to allow Jewish people around the world to ask their own questions. Currently located at judaism.stackexchange.com, Jewish Life and Learning is enjoying it's first week as a beta site. Like most other StackExchange sites though, it will eventually be getting a more normal looking domain as well as a completely custom design.

One thing to note about the site is it's reliability. Just like anyone can ask a question, anyone can answer one. In other words, it's technically possible for invalid info to come up on the site. Like wikipedia, there is no guarantee that the information is valid, and you should keep that in mind before acting on any of the information given by the site.

So visit the site today, and start asking away. I look forward to answering your questions!

An Introduction

Why this blog?

After all my years on the web, I have yet to find a great blog that does one thing, and one thing only: talk about Jewish Technology. Now while there may be many blogs out there that are Jewish oriented, and talk all-things Jewish, I think it's imperative that we have at least one blog out in the blogosphere that has a focus on how Technology is affecting the Jewish world.

In other words, think of this as a Jewish-oriented TechCrunch. Some examples of stuff I want to cover include:

• Jewish Websites
• Jewish Software
• Jewish iPhone and Android apps
• Anything else that comes my way...

Aside for the obvious goal of bringing attention to the various Jewish products that are shaping the globe, I also hope to write reviews on those products, and bring attention to why I think those products are worth mentioning. Which brings me to...

Who am I?

Aside for being Jewish, and having a keen sense of my Jewishness, I am also highly proficient in many programming languages, and have actually worked on various Jewish projects which some of you may even use on a daily basis! (although, the identities of those projects will remain unknown for now, for my anonymity is important to me).

Essentially, it should not matter who I am, but rather, it should matter what I write. Content on the web is king. So the fact that I choose to remain anonymous (and in this day and age I should say, rightfully so), should have no bearing on this blog whatsoever.

You can of course critique anything I write through the use of the commenting feature at the bottom of each post. Additionally, I have provided a contact page so that you may send me suggestions for future posts and articles. While I cannot guarantee that I will post everything that's sent, I will give each submission fair evaluation.

And most importantly: There is no such thing as a "paid-post" on this site. While I may have ads running on the site, the content on the site will be purely based on merit. Money will have no bearing on what or who I write about.

So for now, I leave you to enjoy the site, and I hope that Be'ezras Hashem, this will be a successful journey.

Your Anonymous Author