The Atheist Blogger

In light of recent events surrounding The Barefoot Bum’s brief affair and subsequent termination of his self hosting, I am coming out fully in support of Db0’s efforts to get more people self hosted. The Barefoot Bum has taken down his self hosted site, but his review of self hosting is still in my feed reader. I should point out that I have only respect for The Barefoot Bum, and this post should be read as a counter-point to some of his points against self hosting, as well as to inform people of what they should do in terms of self hosting.

I’ve more-or-less completed the move to the self-hosted blog. Overall I consider the effort an epic fail, justified only in that I like messing with technology for its own sake. The effort has clearly pointed out what the authors of Wordpress need to do to take their technology to the next level.

db0 was very generous with his time and effort to make the move a success, but that his effort was both considerable and absolutely necessary is a strong argument against moving.

Unless you’re a LAMP developer, I strongly recommend that you stick with your free blog, Blogger or Wordpress.com.

The fact that time and effort is needed to make a self hosted blog is not an argument against self hosting, let alone a “strong” argument. A self hosted blog is good for a number of reasons which Db0 went over in his multitude of posts relating to the subject. Such good things do not come easily, and the fact that Db0 offered his services freely surely negates this argument. Unless you are planning to move your blog constantly around, I cannot see how this argument could hold. Moving your blog to a self hosted platform is a one-way trip.

In regards to the “LAMP developer” comment, I would point out only that I set up my first blog at the age of 16, with absolutely no experience with websites, let alone hosting. This was back in the days when WordPress was without the documentation and support it now has. Setting up a WordPress blog is now one of the easiest things to do with a self hosted account. WordPress has a large number of tutorials (written by users) that should guide you through the process.

On the other hand, Blogger is much easier to use than Wordpress, since Google has complete control over the feature set. Wordpress is getting better, but it’s still much more complex and many features and user interface elements are counter-intuitive.

Wordpress is a great system, but it suffers the problem of almost all open-source systems. It’s written by computer nerds for computer nerds and requires a steep learning curve just to get started. There are already enough cool features in Wordpress; the developers need to focus on ease of use for the non-technical user. Firefox should be their model. They also need to support scripts.

I don’t quite understand how WordPress is counter intuitive, especially in regard to the user interface. As Db0 pointed out on the original post, you click “Settings” for settings, “Write” for writing a post. If you cannot work out where to find everything, go look it up and you will most likely remember it for next time.

A “steep learning curve” is possibly a tad over-dramatic as I have already pointed out the vast documentation for beginners and the easy to use interface. The documentation isn’t meant to be read cover to cover, but is meant to help on individual sections. If you want to know how to add widgets or change settings, you will find the relevant article.

Supporting scripts is one of the things that WordPress has nailed completely, so I do not see how Barefoot Bum managed to miss this. You can either edit the templates and add the code, or simply add it to a text widget. Both take less than 1 minute to do.

Wordpress also needs to make migration from Blogger 100% complete, bulletproof and one-click. Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress was “easy” only in the computer nerd sense of “not completely impossible.” For the ordinary person the process is extremely complicated. I couldn’t have done myself: db0 did most of the work. I still have to manually move my non-scripted blogrolls (I link to 100 or so blogs) item by item. I still have to maintain my original blog, because there are still many people linking there. (Indeed the hit count on the original blog hasn’t dropped much). I suspect also that Pedro Timoteo has abandoned the Planet Atheism aggregator, so I have to continue posting links to the old blog to publish my content there. I still have to migrate James F. Elliott’s posts.

You will never get a migration system that is “one-click”, nor one that is “bulletproof” for the simple reason that both are too complex to perform globally. Authentication is needed to export the blogger account, and after that it is actually a one-click process. Given the vast differences in styles of Blogger and WordPress, having everything move across perfectly will be impossible.

As for the blogrolls, it can be a pain, but there are alternatives such as creating a text-widget and simply pasting the raw html code from the old blog. No harm, no fuss, done in a few minutes.

As for maintaining the old blog, I find this process counter to the original aim of the exercise, which was to move to a self hosted blog. You could always post an article linking to the new site, and hope that people get the hint. As for Planet Atheism, I thought they do everything via RSS, so all one would have to do would be to change the RSS feed they have in their database. If you used something like FeedBurner already, this process would be much easier.

That said, I’m sorry it didn’t work out for The Barefoot Bum. I’m not sure whether I agree with a week trial for something like this, as in my opinion 7 days does not give you enough time to properly go over the interface and make sure you understand everything. I think if more emphasis was put on the documentation, people might last longer. It seems a waste of a hosting account though, especially one that has been paid for, along with the domain.

So, what advice should I give to people wishing to move?

Well, firstly I would make sure they knew that this might be a tricky process first time, as it is with all new things. When you get a new car you only know the basic functions, and need to read the manual to find out how to change the clock, and find out where everything is. The same applies to self hosting. Once you have done it the first time, you will understand it more. Hopefully though, you will never have to move the blog again!

Secondly, I would ask people to comply with a month long (possibly more) trial of the new hosting. DO NOT just give up after a few days because something is going wrong. When I first moved from Windows to Linux (arguably more confusing that self hosting) there were many times when I messed up configuration files and had to spend hours messing around in terminals. This wasn’t a negative point, it was a learning curve. If I had given up there and then I wouldn’t have reached the point where I am now, which is with a very efficient and fast version of Gentoo Linux, self configured.

Finally, I would demand people ask about things they do not understand. Db0 is doing this for free, and I would be happy to provide support, or answer questions about WordPress. I have already linked to the documentation for WordPress, so please use it!

This week has been filled with problems, with the server going down from the Digg Effect, and an atheist forums I help run almost driven to extinction. The previous owner (who was meant to be my partner in the scheme) told me he had sold the site and lost the contact details of the new owner. This apparently happened several months ago, and meant that we were left with a forum that we couldn’t upgrade or fix the current errors.

We decided that since we only had 1000 posts, we’d simply move domain and start again. The new forums are running well and everyone is happy. I started a thread in which members could post their picture if they wanted to, and I suddenly realised that other than small gravatar images, most people probably have no idea what I look like.

So without further ado, here is a picture I took this afternoon. It’s not very good quality and I should have done the flash a bit better, but it’ll do. The t-shirt I am wearing is one of my favourites (for good reason). About a month ago I decided that since I had 3 months of nothing all summer, I would grow my first beard and see what it turned out like. I’m not an expert on beards, but I reckon it looks ok, obviously a bit patchy in places. I’m thinking of getting rid of the moustache, only it might actually look better when it connects to the rest of the beard. Obviously I need beard growing advice, so please throw it at me! What should I do? Shave it off? Keep it growing? I need your opinions!

Anyway, here goes.

The essence of a geek.

Also, if the blog goes down in the next hour it’s probably me messing about with the upgrade.

Edit: Justin wanted to know where I got the t-shirt. Why, from ThinkGeek of course! I also have this one, and this one.

As I noted in a previous post, The Atheist Spot are currently interviewing atheist bloggers with a variety of questions. The latest interview posted is with none other than myself, so go read it! I’ve never really answered many questions about atheism in relation to England, so hopefully a few people might come up with a few more.

Atheist Digg-like site The Atheist Spot has been sending questions out to atheist bloggers and posting the answers in a new series called “Get to know an atheist blogger”. It’s a great idea (I’m not just saying that because I got asked) because bloggers tend not to write direct references to their life all in one place. Those of us who do have “About” pages tend to write about the blog and not the author. By asking 9 simple questions, we can reveal more about ourselves as actual people.

The first atheist blogger is relatively new on the scene, but is publishing a book at the moment, and caused a minor controversy over a post calling for atheists to get out of the closet. Regular readers will remember that my response was the “re-emerge” from said closet, complete with a megaphone and sparkly jacket. He is of course, Craig A. James.

The second in line is one who everyone probably knows, although whose persona is shrouded in mystery (for good reason too). Nevertheless, vjack from Atheist Revolution is a very successful and popular blogger and a must read.

Look out for my answers to the questions on The Atheist Spot blog, but I’ll post a link when they are up anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me, my laptop has got itself stuck with an American keyboard, and I hate having to push Shift + ‘ to get a “

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.

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