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Carnival of the Godless #121

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:00:18 +0000

The 121st Carnival of the Godless is now up at State of Protest, so go check it out! As always there are some fantastic posts featured, and if you haven’t submitted a post to the carnival, do so; it’s a great way to get visitors to your blog! Whilst you’re at it, why not request to host the carnival in the future?

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Reddit & Readership

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:27:59 +0000

It is a universal truth: all bloggers are readership whores. We exist to get our blogs noticed and read by as many people as possible. I currently have several ways of spreading my articles on the internet, mostly through use of Digg, The Atheist Spot, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. I previously played about with StumbleUpon but found that submitting stuff is limited. If you don’t submit stuff from different websites, you get blocked out by the submission system until you do. For bloggers, this is useless.

Reddit is the next best thing as I have recently learned. I used to submit stuff to the general reddit website, and I got a few hits here are there. My reddit “karma” didn’t really go anywhere. A few days ago db0 published an article about increasing your readership (see what I mean? READERSHIP WHORES!!!) using the subreddit: atheism. Not being a regular reddit user, I had no idea what a subreddit was.

I do now. A subreddit is essentially a custom reddit based on a particular subject. The idea being that instead of submitting an article about star wars to the general reddit site, you can submit it to the subreddit “starwars” instead. People can subscribe to that subreddit, choosing only to get articles about Star Wars. Pretty neat. The “atheism” subreddit was created 7 months ago and has over 15,000 subscribers. THAT IS A LOT.

So I began submitting my articles to the atheism subreddit. My karma has almost tripled in the last 24 hours and is continually growing. My articles have been rated up more times than any of the ones I had previously submitted to the general reddit. To do a test, I submitted one of my first articles which was one of my most popular; the 101 Atheist Quotes one. In the last hour it has had a massive amount of hits, and it made me want to resubmit all of my previous articles. I’m not that much of a whore though.

What is great about the subreddit is that you can subscribe to its RSS feed and get a constantly updated list of new submissions. Of course, you get absolutely everything so that might pose a problem for amateur RSS users. Others (like myself) have RSS feeds set up in such a way that if I don’t check it every day I find myself with over 3000 unread articles. However this really isn’t advisable unless you spend more than 50% of the day on your computer.

So, to sum up:

The atheism subreddit is AWESOME. The Atheist Spot is equally awesome because it is dedicated totally to atheism and the developers are great guys who like to keep readership whores like myself well fed. Join both, submit to both, spread the word.

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Do I Overuse The Atheist Spot?

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:05:19 +0000

I have a rather monotonous way of sharing posts for this blog. Once I’ve typed it all up, added useful and relevant tags, and put it all into categories, I submit the post. I then check it all looks good on the actual page, and start my submission process.

This usually starts off by submitting the article to Digg, then to Del.icio.us, Reddit, and finally The Atheist Spot. If you want your blog to get popular quickly, I highly recommend this strategy (it helps to actually have something readable as well). I would say that the precious few minutes I spend submitting content to sharing sites like these is one of the reasons I get so many hits and responses.

I regularly check my stats for the blog, and visitors per month has increased exponentially since February 2008 when I started. My technorati authority has likewise increased, and I am awaiting the day it finally reaches the first milestone of 100 (at the time of writing it is at 90). What I am concerned about is The Atheist Spot, the newest sharing site I’m using, but also the most useful given the common topic.

The Atheist Spot is a Digg-like site which operates by user votes. When a blog article is submitted it gets 1 vote (from the submitter). People who read the article and like it can vote it up, and people who hate it can vote it down. As soon as an article gets 5 votes or more, it can get a place on the homepage, which shows the “top” articles.

Why am I concerned?

Since I write an article roughly once every day, sometimes more, I check The Atheist Spot daily as well. I cannot remember a time in the last month when I have not had less than 3 articles in the top 10 at any one time. A few weeks ago five of my articles were on the homepage, making up 50% of the entries listed. Today, I count four, three of which are in the top 4 overall.

I’m naturally glad that people like my articles, but I am certain there must be more deserving blogs out there that are being pushed out of the homepage by my stuff. The Atheist Spot is there to be used granted, but am I overusing it? If I cut down on the posts I submitted to it, I would lose some interest, but I wouldn’t be the dominating blog. Of course conversly, if the reason I am often on the homepage multiple times is because only a few regular bloggers use the service, then I would encourage more people to submit their articles!

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Christianity Doesn’t Work As Advertised

Adrian Hayter — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:00:15 +0000

An interesting collection of articles showing that:

“Abstinence Only” doesn’t work.
Christianity corrupts good morals unlike their claim that they created them.
Too much religion is dangerous.
Christian divorce rates are much higher than Atheist ones.
75% of born again Christians are regular liars.
People’s lives aren’t transformed by Christianity.