The Atheist Blogger

A reader expressed some concern over my tendency to post some very off-topic things, such as my upcoming series on Linux, and other non-atheistic things. When I registered this blog back in February, I already had a “personal” blog that I updated semi-regularly. As the popularity of this blog grew however, my efforts on my personal blog died out, so I decided to merge the two together; making the entire process easier for me.

Due to the fun nature of my course (programming + robotics!!!), I find many more things to talk about in my personal work, so naturally more posts would be about those kind of topics. Evidently there are people out there who read my blog for the posts concerning atheism (well I am The Atheist Blogger after all), and care very little or not at all for my posts about anything else. I have therefore devised a solution, and pay attention, because this gets tricky.

If you don’t mind reading posts about atheism and my personal exploits, you can continue using my usual feed: http://atheistblogger.com/feed. This feed uses FeedBurner so it reduces the stress on the server (by a little bit at least) and also keeps some nice stats. If you are apathetic about what you read, please use this feed as well!

If you only want to read my posts about atheism (and all related themes), you can use this feed: http://atheistblogger.com/category/general/feed. It doesn’t use FeedBurner and will deliver you all posts that I post under subcategories of “general” (atheism, religion, god, etc.)

If for some reason you only want to read about my personal exploits, or you want to have a separate feed for those posts, you can use the following feed: http://atheistblogger.com/category/personal/feed

Occasionally I will post something globally (such as this post or a related meme) and it will show up everywhere. Hopefully this will sort the problem out!

Just in case people were wondering, the main site will feature every single post, although if you knock of the “/feed” bit from the end of the above urls, you will be able to view the site with the appropriate filter.

Regular blog readers will know that I use Gentoo Linux as my main operating system, and people who stalk me on facebook will know that I am an Open Source advocate. So I’ve been throwing this idea around in my head for a while, because I know that some of my fellow bloggers use Linux or at least have tried it out. The idea is for me to write a series of blog posts about Linux, how you can get it, set it up, make it suited to your tastes, etc.

In addition to the tutorials, I would offer support to people who are following along and run into problems (it’s bound to happen with any OS change). The main gist of the posts would be to inform, perhaps dispel a few myths, and generally help people out on certain issues. The reason I want to do this now is because obviously I am very passionate about Linux and the free software community, but also because I am approaching the end of term, and I’ll have free time on my hands.

I’m not promising the learning curve won’t still be steep, but my hopes are that people will respond a bit better if they have posts aimed at the average user, without all the techobabble. There are also no promises that everything I say will be entirely accurate, or the “best way” to go about things. The beauty of Linux is that nobody can ever learn everything there is to know about it; it’s a group effort. Naturally when I am corrected on something I will hasten to edit the post. The same goes for when people ask questions about the tutorials; I want to make the posts as accurate and understandable as possible.

The tutorials will cover the Ubuntu operating system (which is what I started out with) due to its ease and stability in comparison with others. However for the most part, people should be able to follow along using any of the major distros, such as Fedora or OpenSuse. For the first few tutorials I will be covering installation and how to set up your system to work for you. I will then move onto the more complex areas, including how (and when) to effectively use the command line.

So all I really need now is feedback on the idea. How many of my readership would be interested in learning about Linux? I’m not going to stop posting about atheism / religion, but it wouldn’t be a personal blog if I didn’t share my hobbies with everyone :D.