The Atheist Blogger

So today was my 21st birthday, huzzah! I’ve had a great day, was taken out to lunch by my mother and her new boyfriend, had a card made for me by my friends, and got given “The Passion of the Christ – Director’s Edition” by my atheist housemate. Unfortunately I’ve also had to revise a load for exams coming up, so it has been a day of trying to comprehend horrible software engineering slides.

As with this time of year, I’m cutting back on the blog to make time for my studies. I’ll still post every now and then, but it will probably be small posts rather than lengthy philosophical musings. I’ve been contacted by a person who wants to write some articles for the blog, so hopefully that will go ahead and we’ll have some form of content going. If anyone else wants to write the odd article, or share something you think others might like, then feel free to contact me.

Oh, and 21 in binary is 10101 which is palindromic and awesome. Another example is in base 4, where the number is 111. If I ever want to feel like a teenager again, I can use hexadecimal and get 15!

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!