The Atheist Blogger

I was randomly checking my long forgotten Google Analytics stats the other day, and I found a bit of traffic from Google searches, mostly coming from the keywords “atheist quotes” or “atheist blog”. However, one phrase stood out: “Would You Like to Know the Truth?”. Its the title of a post I made about a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet which was given to me.

For whatever reason, I did the search myself, and was surprised to find my blog listed as the top result…above the official Jehovah’s Witness website, which actually had the entire leaflet on it.

Me: 1, Jehovah's Witnesses: 0

I count that as a win. My PageRank is truly magnificent.

This of course means I’ll have to make it a new blog aim: To dislodge as many religions from top spots in Google search results. 1 down, only 3,525,463… more to go!

We are approaching the end of another year, and those who regularly read the atheist blogosphere can hardly say it wasn’t a busy one! We’ve had propaganda films to fight off, scandals involving crackers, and plenty of anti-atheist bigotry to deal with. The question still remains though:

How much of it can you remember?

The “Big Fat Atheist Quiz Of The Year” will test how much people have been paying attention in regards to the blogosphere and the news. It will consist of an undecided number of multiple choice questions, presented in an online format on 31st December 2008.

Of course due to the nature of the quiz and people’s dishonesty, there won’t be any prizes, but it should be a fun thing to do. People can certainly brag about their scores (whether real or not).

The questions will be compiled over the next 2 months, and this is where I need some help. Obviously I can come up with a load of questions for the quiz, but if anyone can think of some good ones, please submit them using this online form.

Name / email is only neccessary in case I need to contact you. The “Source” should be a link to a webpage that contains the story relating to the question. For example, if you write a question about the PZ Myers “expelled from expelled” controversy, a link to the blog post by PZ Myers might be a good idea :D

The 3 false answers are entirely optional for you to fill in, but they would help me out a bit later on. If you do include false answers, remember make them a bit challenging!

…and naturally, please submit as many questions as you can!

Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist recently started a new meme where you listed your last 20 emails and what they say about you. I’m starting a new one, only this time it’s with current browser tabs. The reason? I broke my own record today, with 100 tabs open in Firefox.

Taberrific!

The tabs open were as follows:

• 17 Google Searches.
• 10 Wikipedia Articles.
• 9 Facebook.
• 7 of this site.
• 3 Slashdot.
• 3 Gentoo Wiki Articles.
• 2 YouTube Videos.
• 2 Amazon.co.uk Items
• 2 Problogger Articles
• 2 Chicken Girl
• 2 Atheist Forums
• 2 Discomforting Ignorance
• 2 Amiable Atheist
• 2 Splendid Elles
• 1 RichardDawkins.net
• 1 Google Video
• 1 Atheist Experience
• 1 Barefoot Bum
• 1 Southern Electric
• 1 Least I Could Do
• 1 Joy Of Tech
• 1 ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH…MY EYES!
• 1 xkcd
• 1 Comedy Central
• 1 The Daily Show
• 1 Explosm
• 1 Times Online
• 1 Friendly Atheist
• 1 Pharyngula
• 1 Daily Mail
• 1 Royal Holloway University of London
• 1 Conrad Koppitz
• 1 SSH reference site
• 1 Revver
• 1 Perl Reference Site
• 1 Division By Zero
• 1 Raytractors
• 1 Powers of 10
• 1 Google Android Mobile
• 1 Atheist Stats Site
• 1 Rapture Ready
• 1 Java API
• 1 Dmitry Brant
• 1 Gutenberg.org
• 1 BBC News Article
• 1 My Blog Log
• 1 Sanity Project
• 1 Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men
• 1 Government e-petition

What did I learn?

I use Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook way too often, and I need to learn how to use the “close tab” button on Firefox.

What next?

If you are as geeky as me and use a browser with tabs (sorry I.E 6 users) then write a blog post with your tab list. It was fun to see which sites I visit most, and I get to link to my favourite ones!

Carnival of Evolution is a new blog carnival that describes itself thusly^[1]:

Do you care about the science behind evolution? Do you marvel at the tiny molecular machines spewing out coded messages to the microscopic inhabitants of your own bodied world? Do you grow irate at the ignorance pushers, the peddlers of relatively impotent gods, and the disintegration of science education in the modern world? Do you like to stay abreast of current topics and scientific findings in the study of the organismal existences surrounding us or those long gone?

If so, this is the blog carnival for you.

Their tagline is awesome: “3.7 billion years of molecular changes culminating in the emergence of matter inspecting its own origins and existence”

Of course like all new blog carnivals they need to be advertised, and people need to start submitting posts. At the moment it seems like the carnival is stationary (on the single blog), but that may change in the future, who knows.

The 1st carnival consisted of 10 incredible and fascinating insights into Evolutionary biology, and one article in which a man who knows next to nothing about Evolution compared to the other guys writes about how Ray Comfort is a moron. *cough*

But seriously, thanks for the include. I am certain that my article would stand out and cause people to want to write much better articles. The more of these carnivals there are, the better people will understand evolution, even if they take tiny steps at a time.

The last 4 hours have seen me go through several emotions, excitement, shock, despair, frustration, to name but a few. After submitting one of my most popular articles (101 Atheist Quotes) to the atheism subreddit, it managed to climb its way to the top link. It also made it onto the reddit homepage if “atheism” was a category selected. This was exciting.

In the short space of an hour, 7000 people managed to connect to the site. Due to a badly configured file in the apache config, the entire server overloaded and crashed. After fixing the file, the server continued to run very slowly. A look at the logs showed a large amount of incoming traffic from Digg. With hesitation, I loaded up the Digg homepage, and saw the 101 Atheist Quotes article, with 487 votes. This was a combination of shock, excitement, terror, and despair.

The server was undergoing what is commonly referred to as “The Digg Effect”. Essentially a massive influx of visitors caused by an article being featured on Digg. The server promptly crashed again under the pressure, with PHP and Apache complaining about everything. This was frustrating, but we managed to get rid of the plugins that were causing the problem. At the same time we hastily installed the WP-Super-Cache plugin to help with the load.

Some hours later, the article had reached 850 votes, and it finally got pushed off the home page of Digg. This slowed down the traffic by a lot, but the votes were still going up, and only time will tell where it goes from here. Currently it has 976 votes, and is on the second page of the top last 24 hours section.

Of course, the kicker about this is that I didn’t even submit this to Digg (at least not this time). My original submission, made back in Febrary, managed to get around 36 diggs. This new submission was made by brown3218, who also put it in the category of “Science” which might explain why it got all the attention. I don’t disagree with the people who responded saying “this is in the wrong category”, but there is not much I can do about it. Science is a popular category on Digg, and this only proves that a load of atheists frequent it.

Hopefully I got some new subscribers out of it, but I’m at least proud to say that other than a few errors, I survived the Digg effect in one piece!