The Atheist Blogger

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!

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.

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

I help run a general atheist forum which has recently been increasing in activity. The topic of Evolution comes up now and then, and the creationists always bring up all the misconceptions again and again. Sometimes you wish you had an hour or so to write an massively long response to them, citing all their mistakes, providing lots of evidence, and backing it all up with research. This rarely happens since it takes far too much effort for simple online forums, and often people are left simply pointing out simple mistakes and telling the creationists to “go do some proper research”.

When it does happen however, it completely blows everyone away.

The member, solidsquid, a self proclaimed “Dioist“, wrote an epic post complete with images, research, links, and references. It must have taken ages to put together, and I applaud him for his efforts. The question is, will any creationists actually read it?

Regular visitors to the blog will have noticed that a few weeks ago I added a random quote generator to the top of the site, which serves an atheist quote every time the page is loaded. The quotes were originally from one of my first blog posts “101 Atheist Quotes“, with the occasional one added in when I find it.

I’ve also recently purchased the book “The Quotable Atheist” which is full of quotes about atheism / religion from popular people, so a few more should be added when I flick through it and find great ones.

The thing is, anyone can make atheist quotes. The popular ones are made by well-known people since they have a massive advantage of getting the quote out in the public domain. Some other popular ones are marked as “anonymous” but logic confirms they must have had some kind of origin. Why should atheist quotes be confined to anonymous people or popular philosophers / thinkers?

Back in May, I asked my forum members to come up with their own atheist quotes, which would be added to the random quote generator on the forums. Now that we’ve got a few I can fulfill my promise, but I’m also going to put them on the main site, and make the thread known to anyone who reads this post. So if anyone can think up any atheist quotes that are original (or witty modifications) please either join the forums and post, or post them in the comments to this article. They will *eventually* be added to the random quote generator with your name (if you give it) or your alias you use here. If you want your name linked to your website, please make it known!

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