The Atheist Blogger

Are you gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered? Have you rejected Gods of all kinds? Then Reed Braden (Homosecular Gaytheist) might have  proposal for you! Reed plans to create a collaborative blog of gay atheist activists, where issues that affect both minority groups will be discussed, a kind of Skepchick blog, only where the chicks like other chicks, and the guys like…well, you get the picture.

The idea has already got the attention of Greta Christina, as well as some other atheist bloggers (myself included). If you are interested or just want to find out more, go and join the facebook group!

If you have not already added me on facebook as a friend (and please do, it helps feed my ego) then you can easily access my profile by going to http://facebook.com/atheistblogger.

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!

If people have noticed, I haven’t been posting on the blog for about a week and a half. I’ve been extremely busy with coursework deadlines and general other university related stuff that I haven’t had the time to post. Ok well I maybe had the time, but not the drive. I’ve also been preparing for my trip to Georgia (state not country) which I leave for today. Luckily, this time I get to take my laptop along since it hasn’t exploded like the last one. I have a few blog posts in the burner, including some updates to the Ray Comfort series (which admittedly isn’t “almost daily” due to my absence and Ray’s trip to NZ). I also have an interview with Darrin Rasberry, the now-agnostic who wrote the foreword to Ray’s latest book.

One thing that I have been doing with my spare time is using Twitter because it allows me to blog 140 characters at a time, which isn’t much, and therefore doesn’t take much time to do. If you aren’t using the service, I highly recommend it. If you are, please follow me! Another thing I’ve been doing whilst not posting is reading the multitude of comments that have appeared on my post about religious child abuse in the form of Deborah Drapper. The 127 (currently) comments on that post are a very interesting read, and there is a lot of debate going on, something which I am thankful I have Intense Debate installed to handle.

So now I have to go check everything is packed before leaving for Heathrow Terminal 5 (which luckily is a 15 minute drive from here). I hear the new terminal actually works now, and they don’t lose bags anymore. My flight leaves at 15:00 and according to British Airways I’ll be in sunny Georgia at around 19:10, just in time for dinner! I’ll be posting on Twitter as much as I can at the airport, since I won’t have anything better to do. No idea if I’ll be able to respond though.

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!

As you have probably noticed, I have changed the site logo from the “atheist atom” to the scarlet “A”. I did this for a few reasons:

1. When I originally came across the atom symbol, I simply thought it was a cool logo for atheism, with the “A” standing for atheism. However I quickly learned that it was the symbol of American Atheists and the “A” stood for America. Since I am not American and not in any way affiliated with American Atheists, I don’t think there is much reason having it there.
2. I think the site needs less black and white and a bit more colour.
3. The scarlet A is more accepted as a universal symbol for atheism, and it is pretty!

I also changed the favicon symbol to the A as well, but you may have to flush your browser cache before that appears.

I wanted to find out what people think of the site look overall, and reader feedback is very important to me. I want to know what people think of the layout of the site, for example is the two column structure good or would three column be better? How about the colour scheme? The fonts? Do you think the site should have a proper banner instead of just a logo and a text title? If so, would someone be willing to design one for me? (I suck at that sort of thing).

Finally, I have temporarily closed the forum as it was running an old version of the software which is prone to attacks, and it wasn’t being used that often anyway. When I started the forum up, I used to spend time there discussing issues with the members, but in recent months a previous forum I started about 2 years ago got popular very quickly, and I had to divert attention to that. In fact, that forum is now running a book club similar to the one that used to run here, only a lot more people are taking part. So I guess my final question is, do you really need a forum on the blog when we have such a great comments system that can be used for debate, and when a bigger and better forum is already available?

As I mentioned, feedback is very important to me, as I want this blog to be easily accessible by readers. Anything you think may help should be brought up! The only thing I would really object to is the actual site theme, which I like because it is plain and fast.