The Atheist Blogger

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.

A load of tech-based blogs (and some atheist ones) have been going on about the new Google browser “Chrome”. It looks good (nice and basic), and it is built on the best rendering engine: WebKit. I’ve often wished Mozilla just used WebKit, or at least had a function to switch rendering engines. There has been a bit of idle chatter about possibly using WebKit with Firefox, but it never leads anywhere.

There is one problem with Chrome though; it doesn’t work on Linux. That might not come as a surprise to most people, since a load of you probably use Windows (eurgh), or Mac OSX (eurgh eurgh). However, given Google’s commitments to Linux it is rather odd that they wouldn’t develop the version for Linux at the same time as the Windows release. Every Google server currently runs Linux, all their company computers run Linux, and it is no secret that the company itself hates Microsoft.

So why have they committed to a Windows Beta, and then promised a Linux version after the release of version 1.0? They don’t understand that I have to restart my computer, boot into the miserable NTFS partition, wait 5 minutes for XP to load, fiddle about with the wireless network which never manages to start properly, and then wait a further minute for my web browser to load, all just to download and install a copy of the beta.

Seeing as I don’t use Windows for anything other than gaming, I usually wouldn’t have much time to play around with it. Luckily, in two days time, Spore comes out, and my ext3 partition won’t see the light of day for several weeks. Of course my laptop will still provide me with my daily fix of Gentoo for good measure. So Chrome will become my browser for browsing Spore forums, looking at creatures other people have created, and of course, downloading copious amounts of “Spornography”.

It is a universal truth: all bloggers are readership whores. We exist to get our blogs noticed and read by as many people as possible. I currently have several ways of spreading my articles on the internet, mostly through use of Digg, The Atheist Spot, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. I previously played about with StumbleUpon but found that submitting stuff is limited. If you don’t submit stuff from different websites, you get blocked out by the submission system until you do. For bloggers, this is useless.

Reddit is the next best thing as I have recently learned. I used to submit stuff to the general reddit website, and I got a few hits here are there. My reddit “karma” didn’t really go anywhere. A few days ago db0 published an article about increasing your readership (see what I mean? READERSHIP WHORES!!!) using the subreddit: atheism. Not being a regular reddit user, I had no idea what a subreddit was.

I do now. A subreddit is essentially a custom reddit based on a particular subject. The idea being that instead of submitting an article about star wars to the general reddit site, you can submit it to the subreddit “starwars” instead. People can subscribe to that subreddit, choosing only to get articles about Star Wars. Pretty neat. The “atheism” subreddit was created 7 months ago and has over 15,000 subscribers. THAT IS A LOT.

So I began submitting my articles to the atheism subreddit. My karma has almost tripled in the last 24 hours and is continually growing. My articles have been rated up more times than any of the ones I had previously submitted to the general reddit. To do a test, I submitted one of my first articles which was one of my most popular; the 101 Atheist Quotes one. In the last hour it has had a massive amount of hits, and it made me want to resubmit all of my previous articles. I’m not that much of a whore though.

What is great about the subreddit is that you can subscribe to its RSS feed and get a constantly updated list of new submissions. Of course, you get absolutely everything so that might pose a problem for amateur RSS users. Others (like myself) have RSS feeds set up in such a way that if I don’t check it every day I find myself with over 3000 unread articles. However this really isn’t advisable unless you spend more than 50% of the day on your computer.

So, to sum up:

The atheism subreddit is AWESOME. The Atheist Spot is equally awesome because it is dedicated totally to atheism and the developers are great guys who like to keep readership whores like myself well fed. Join both, submit to both, spread the word.

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.

I previously wrote about why I left Atheist Nexus, for reasons that I believed saw the site turning into a more commercial business than a friendly social networking site. I have left the controversial article up, but let me make one thing very clear:

I was wrong.

The article was written as a response / inquiry to the donations listed on the Atheist Nexus website. People have accused me of being impolite by posting “private” donation targets in the public domain. I stand by my actions of posting the amounts, not because I wanted to be impolite, but because the same donation amounts are easily accessible by any member of the public. All you have to do is register (for free) on Atheist Nexus and click the donations link. Is this private? I don’t believe it is. Just because you have to type in a few letters and give your email address doesn’t mean that somehow you have crossed from the public world to a private one, especially when the action requires no payment and little trouble for the end user.

I have also been accused of writing an accusatory article without first consulting Brother Richard on the matter, or anyone at Atheist Nexus. I admit I should have contacted someone official before writing the article, but my previous attempts at contacting anyone at Atheist Nexus have not resulted in any emails other than those explaining that they have received so many emails and are currently going through them all. I could have posted the article in the forums, but how would this have been any different? The forums are public (I can read them when logged out), so what is the difference between posting the article on my website (which I know is read by some Atheist Nexus members) than on the forums. In the end, a subscriber (vjack) linked my article in a thread on Atheist Nexus specifically about the donations.

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