The Atheist Blogger

This is my first blog post since the “Digg Effect” effectively made my site slower than the inner workings of Ray Comfort’s brain. I managed to get over 3,400 votes on Digg, which I think is pretty impressive given the content, and I really must thank everyone who took the time to read the quotes, vote, and leave a nice comment. According to FeedBurner, the people who handle my RSS feeds, I have 622 subscribers now. Hello whoever you are!

If you are new here, you might wish to read the interview that I did for The Atheist Spot. It will at least tell you who I am, why I’m blogging, and what I do when I’m not being caught off-guard by a Digg Effect at 4am.

I didn’t really have much planned to write about today other than on the subject of forums. The blog has its own forum which handles general chat as well as our book club. If you wish to join our book club then you should find all the information on that page. At the start of each month, we vote for a book we want to read the next month (giving people a load of time to get the book). We then discuss the book in an IRC channel, followed by a forum discussion for those who couldn’t make the live discussion.

The book for September is “Biblical Nonsense” by Dr. Jason Long.

I have also just re-launched an atheist orientated forum after some initial mess-ups with the ownership of its predecessor. The new forums has started off well since most of the users of the old one were behind the move. These forums can be found at: http://atheistforums.org

Anyway, now that I have a larger audience I’d better start thinking of stuff to write. Damn you Digg! Making me do some actual work for once! Grrrr….

Edit: Oh yes, and I now have Twitter. You can follow me at: http://twitter.com/AtheistBlogger

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!