The Atheist Blogger

Mojoey over at Deep Thoughts has posted the latest Carnival of the Godless, and I submitted my article about Religious Child Abuse which was featured. Anyway, there are a load of great articles over there, so go check it out!

This has clearly been a YouTube-centered couple of weeks, what with the JREF’s YouTube account being suspended and then subsequently restored. Whilst James Randi might have been happy with the conduct of YouTube in this affair, most people were not. YouTube has a history of censoring people for speaking out, and it has a backwards policy of combating copyright claims. Luckily, this shouldn’t be a problem for much longer, as Brother Richard of the Atheist Nexus leadership has announced on his blog that a new video site, NoGodTube has been launched!

With NoGodTube, we can continue to debate, but on our terms. Theists will be able to present their arguments based on reason, but if they disagree with our responses, they won’t be able to get us banned or flame us. Best of all, we can use NoGodTube to preserve our arguments for posterity.

Some may argue that we will be biased because of our name, NoGodTube. The way I look at it, the statement, “No God” is the default position. Just like “No Unicorns” is the default. The burden of proof is on the believer. In fact, using Carl Sagan’s statement, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” it is more important to claim “No God.” If we find out someday that there are unicorns, the impact on our daily lives would be much smaller. – Brother Richard

NoGodTube isn’t designed to be a replacement for YouTube, but rather a supplement to it. People can upload a video to both YouTube and NoGodTube, knowing that even if their account is suspended or their videos taken down, they still have a viewable backup copy. Plus, the new site won’t censor videos and is open to discussion from both sides of the argument, atheist and theist.

Hopefully a lot of people will start uploading videos relating to atheism, and perhaps some of the big YouTube names like Thunderf00t, The Amazin Atheist, and gogreen18 will create accounts to backup their videos. If I ever get back into video blogging (no promises) I’ll make sure to use it, and I reckon that under the leadership of Brother Richard this project can only get better.

The popular social networking site for atheists has been experimenting with new chat systems. The first has the ability for chat participants to post urls to videos on video sharing sites like YouTube, and everyone in the chat can view them with a built-in player. The only problem with this chat is that the area for chatting is made tiny by the video player, and there is no way of resizing it.

The second chat was released today, and has a much better interface. Firstly, it has the ability for users to use video/audio to chat. You can choose who you want to listen to, adding multiple people to a special “dock” which holds a maximum of 4. All of the interface is collapsible, so getting a larger area for chatting takes only a few clicks. The chat has already made some big impressions on Atheist Nexus users:

I think it’s a very interactive way to talk to Austrians about how they aren’t British. I also think it’s a great way for Adrian to say things that he doesn’t realise can be taken out of context to make him sound like a child molester on Twitter. It’s great fun, and if Adrian one day runs for British government, I will be able to blackmail him and I’ll be that much closer to becoming the Queen of England. – Splendid Elles

A female user named Cassie said the interface was like:

Fist-fucking.

Patch had this to say:

Incest – Patch has been banned.

Finally, Edwin the Drummer admitted of the interface:

It’s pretty cool.

So with all those rave reviews in mind, head over to Atheist Nexus to register and come chat!

A few weeks ago I mentioned on Twitter that I’d created a prototype atheist ranking system that automatically updates and ranks using a variation of Hemant Mehta’s original algorithm. Quite a few blogs commented on it and spread it around, and ever since I’ve been getting almost daily emails from people asking about it and sending me their blogs to add to it. So I thought it was high time I explained the project and what I plan to do with it.

Firstly, as has been mentioned many times before, this ranking system does not say which blogs are the “best”. It only ranks by popularity, and although generally speaking the more popular blogs tend to be of high quality, it isn’t always the case (just look at Ray Comfort’s blog). Some of the attributes measured will depend somewhat on the age of the blog. Older blogs tend to have more links to them, although this too isn’t always the case. The good thing about this system is that it updates every week, so as blogs get older, their rank should become more accurate.

The attributes which are calculated are:

• Google PageRank (The rank of the blog homepage as used by Google in search results)
• Google Backlinks (The number of pages Google can find that link back to the blog)
• Google Readers (The number of people who subscribe to the blog through Google Reader)
• Alexa Rank (The rank of the website as calculated by Alexa, which uses a toolbar installed on various web browsers to collect stats)
• Alexa Backlinks (Same as Google Backlinks, only calculated by Alexa)
• Alexa Reach (The rank of the website calculated by number of visits)
• Technorati Rank (The rank of the website a calculated by Technorati)
• Technorati Authority (How many websites actively link to the blog over a period of 3 months)
• Technorati Backlinks (The exact number of links coming back to the blog – no defined period)
• Yahoo Backlinks (The number of pages Yahoo can find that link back to the blog).

Of course these attributes will probably change down the line. Through doing some research for this system, I became aware that some things like Technorati ranks are calculated by using the Technorati authority and backlinks. Having all those attributes doesn’t really help with the ranking, but it might be useful to still display them. I made sure to use the word “prototype” very carefully on the rankings page, since although the system currently works, it is far from complete. A prototype should be a system that works but lacks certain features and is made up of code stubs.

An example of how the system is a prototype can be seen by looking at the database where all the values are stored. The database currently consists of only one table, which stores every single piece of information in it. A screenshot of part of this table can be seen below.

NOT the way to do it.

Database programmers out there will realise why this is such a bad way of doing it. It isn’t easy to maintain, and each time I want to add a new ranking attribute I have to change the entire table. Luckily, I already have a better database system outlined on my whiteboard at home, and it makes use of 4 distinct tables. The great thing about this new design is that it can be used to store a “history” of rankings. Whereas the above database overwrites all calculated values when it updates, the new system simply adds new rows with the updated information.

My current plans for the system are outlined below:

• Ranks atheist blogs by various attributes, and displays paginated lists of the top sites, 20 sites per page.
• Options to rank sites by different values (e.g. Google PageRank) instead of the default overall rank.
• View the history of individual sites by attributes. A graph will be generated to show how attributes have changed over time.
• Interactive “badges” will allow sites included in the rankings to display an image that tells the world about their rank.
• A submit form will enable people to add their own sites to the system (and hopefully cut down on the number of emails I get asking to be added :P)

Of course, I realise the irony of having an atheist ranking system on my own blog; it means that my blog will simply rise up the rankings as more people visit it. For this reason, the first released version of the system will have its own website, on a separate domain. I’ve also received some interest in this project generally, and so when I have a working system I will be releasing the source code so people can use it to rank other types of site (or build a competitor to mine).

Finally, if you have any questions, want to point out a mistake in my system plan, shout abuse at how ranking systems are evil, ask for your site to be added to the prototype, or generally have a chit chat, please leave a comment :D

One year ago today (even to this very minute – thank you Wordpress scheduling!), a 19 year old Computer Science student had a ridiculous idea; to register the domain “atheistblogger.com” and start a blog about atheism. He had no real experience in the blogging world, and the only reason he did it was that an atheist-related post he made on his dwindling personal blog got thousands of hits, and he realised there might be something to this “atheist blogging” lark.

So here we all are, a whole orbit of the Earth later, and what an orbit it has been. I wrote down 101 atheist quotes which got featured on the Digg homepage and managed to crash the server (leading to me pulling an almost all-nighter in order to fix it). I got in contact with hundreds of atheists online through various blogs, and through them found things like the atheist blogroll (which has been down due to technical issues for 4 months now! grrrr). I also saw the formation of new websites like The Atheist Spot and Atheist Nexus, as well as many new blogs.

I got introduced to the Secular Student Alliance via Hemant Mehta, and since then, my student group has picked up the pace and started running all sorts of events. I’ve also been sent a load of books by fans of the blog, and I promise I’ll get round to reading them eventually! I’ve started an atheist forum which has brought together atheists from all over the world and of all different ages to share life experiences, and one thing can certainly be said of all this:

I started blogging for me, and I ended up blogging for you. Many thanks to all my wonderful readers; here’s to another year!