The Atheist Blogger » website

A Few Questions

Adrian Hayter — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:31:13 +0000

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:

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.
I think the site needs less black and white and a bit more colour.
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.

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Get A Move On Google!

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:35:16 +0000

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”.

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Reddit & Readership

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:27:59 +0000

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.

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My Interview

Adrian Hayter — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:21:09 +0000

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.

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Birmingham Bigots

Adrian Hayter — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:24:53 +0000

According to the BBC, Birmingham City Council have decided to ban websites about atheism, witchcraft, the paranormal, sexual deviancy, and criminal activity. Every other site is allowed (especially Christian, Islamic, Hindu sites) but the new system has effectively outlawed any sites relating to satanism or the occult, which apparently now includes atheism. Strangely there is one section of the Birmingham Councils software description that stands out.

or any other form of mysticism

Hold on a sec. Mysticism is defined as “a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy”^[1], and as “the pursuit of achieving communion, identity with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the Other, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight”.^[2]

It seems that every single religion practices this. Prayer, whether it is Christian or Muslim, is a “pursuit” of some form of communication between God / Allah and the believer. So already all Christian and Islamic websites which advocate prayer should be out of the loop. So should all evangelical websites that call for believers to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus. The last time I checked, a personal relationship is a union of sorts, but is definitely a direct experience. Indeed, many Christian denominations have a mystical theology called theosis, and the Muslims have a similar one known as Irfan.

In fact the Wikipedia page lists a few mystical practices for both Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as one for Jainism. If this software is really meant to block any other form of mysticism, then it should rightly block every religious site on the web.

I’m fully in support of atheist sites being banned from work, as well as Wiccan or Satanistic sites. The National Secular Society are considering legal action to let atheist sites be viewable, but they have the entire thing backwards. They should instead be harassing the council to block all religion based sites, or even better, block the entire web from work altogether.

The council issued this statement about the value of internet access for staff:

The aim of this is to provide greater control for individual line managers to monitor internet usage, and for departments, such as trading standards and child protection, to gain access, if needed, to certain sites for business reasons.

I can think of something that would be easier to manage internet access. Instead of having a blacklist, have a whitelist (like China). Instead of banning sites that have certain keywords or names, block every single site and then start compiling a list of allowed websites. When a staff member needs to view a specific website, simply add it to the list. It would take literally two minutes at most to do, and you would get staff actually working instead of logging into MySpace and Facebook all day.

Thanks to The Amiable Atheist for the link!

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Some New Atheist Quotes

Adrian Hayter — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:20:47 +0000

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!

What follows is a collection of the quotes so far added to the random quote generator:

I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Santa Clause, and for the same reason. – akbar “buffet style theist”

Everything I see around me day-to-day and everything I learn confirms in my mind that there is nothing supernatural going on. – allan175

Saying a supernatural God created the universe has about as much credibility as saying George W. Bush is intelligent. – Nick A.

Someone once said, “Religion is the force that rescued man from barbarism”, which is like saying, “Wall Street rescued mankind from poverty” – Neowolfe

Following a religion is like using someone else’s character in a game of D&D. It works until you realize that you could have done a better job creating it yourself. – oliver

If God cared enough to want me to care, he should tell me. – oliver

And finally a few of my own:

Believers claim that atheists are cold and empty inside, and yet the same people claim that the only reason we are good is because some almighty being made us that way. To me, that seems pretty cold and empty.

Claiming Evolution led to the Holocaust is akin to claiming that gravity is responsible for every single war. Without gravity, bullets wouldn’t fly, and bombs wouldn’t drop, so please stop your incredulous claims that a fact of nature is responsible when it was clearly the work of men.

Religion is faith without the need for knowledge. Science is knowledge without the need for faith.

Do you have your own atheist quote? Here is your chance to have it seen on the home page of this blog!

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The Atheist Blogger Wordle

Adrian Hayter — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:20:14 +0000

A Division by Zer0 found a useful website called Wordle that reads a webpage or feed and arranges the most popular words into patterns. Here is the one for my current feed (click to enlarge):

I like how the words “atheists” and “people” are stuck out, reminding those pesky fundamentalists that we really are people too…

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Atheist Nexus Needs Vast Improvements

Adrian Hayter — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:54:52 +0000

So a few people are talking about this new website “Atheist Nexus“. I was invited yesterday by the managing director Thor and I signed up to take a look. Although the site is a very good idea, it is currently very poorly designed. I’d love to comment on all the great things it could do for the community, but before it even tries to connect people it needs to address a load of issues:

There is far too much code on every page. This bloats the website out which leads to slower loading times as well as slower actual scrolling of the website.
There is a stupid amount of CSS for the site layout. I’ve been designing websites for years and the site could be made easily with a fraction of the CSS they use.
The JavaScript is bloated and used way too much. AJAX is great in moderation, but using it for everything only works when you have very tidy and small scripts working together, not a load of large scripts dotted all over the place.
What is up with the theme? Since when did cityscapes have something to do with atheism? I’m afraid that light blue on white doesn’t go very well for the main links, and they could have saved resources in a load of areas by using color attributes instead of images.

Now I know everyone is getting all excited about a new social networking site, but it’s not new at all, and it certainly isn’t original. A quick look at the source code tells you that the entire site is just linking into ning.com, a “make your own” social networking site. Put simply, this entire project isn’t original, and it hasn’t got a team of devs behind it. It will be updated when ning.com wants to update their entire system.

Compare this with another popular atheist site, Atheist Spot. They actively listen to user feedback and change the site accordingly. An example of this happened a few weeks ago when they reduced the number of categories to a measly 3 generalised ones, a which point there were a few angry emails, and the next day they were back, along with tagging abilities a week later.

This level of devotion to the users is exactly what makes Atheist Spot so brilliant, and what makes Atheist Nexus (as a dependant of ning.com) so useless. People want changes and they won’t get them.

I’ve had a brief discussion with a friend who I’m moving in with in a few weeks, and we reckon the “atheist community” deserves more. As programmers, we will be developing a proper atheist/agnostic/skeptic/rationalist/naturalist social networking site. Unlike Atheist Nexus it will have an active team of developers who will listen and implement new ideas quickly and effectively. It will be fast loading with only neccessary flashy effects to make the user experience better.

If you are a programmer and want to help, let me know, or if you have ideas please make them heard.

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Are There 250,000 Atheists On Facebook?

Adrian Hayter — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:51:26 +0000

A question asked and answered by members of a new Facebook group, aimed at being the opposite of the countless groups like “I bet I can find 1,000,000 Christians”. This group wants to find at least a quarter of a million non-believers on Facebook and unite them in one place.

Currently the group has just over 950 members, and needs people to join up and help them reach their goal. Since there are over 70 million registered users on Facebook, finding 250,000 atheists amongst them should be an easy feat.

If you want to learn more about the group and the guy helping to run it, visit his blog.

In other news, my exams are over. Prepare for a load of updating and information concerning the book club discussion in the next few days!

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Expelled – More Copyright Infringement?

Adrian Hayter — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:15:12 +0000

It seems that Expelled is generating a load of publicity recently, and not because of it’s release today. So far, the list of items Expelled has stolen is this:

“Inner Life of the Cell” made by Harvard professors
Music from John Lennon
Music from The Killers

Could breaking web design licenses also be on that list? After a bit of poking around I found that the blog theme used on the Expelled site (http://expelledthemovie.com/blog – I’m not making it a hyperlink for very good reasons) is the same theme I use on my personal blog, albeit very edited.

Editing this theme isn’t against the license it has on it, but is has this very specific line:

A link back to N.Design Studio must be retained in the footer (either modified or unmodified)

The theme in question is GlossyBlue by the N.Design Studio mentioned, and it is a very good theme, being both attractive and XHTML compliant. I have contacted the designer to enquire whether Expelled purchased a license for the theme (which would enable them to remove the link), but considering they didn’t bother to pay for most of the rest of the film content, I really wouldn’t be surprised if they “overlooked” this as well.

On a related note, it seems the Expelled producers are denying making a copy of the animation (the similarities are hopefully enough to be prosecuted). This statement was place on their website:

Editor’s Note: Questions have been raised about the origination of some of the animation used in our movie EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. Claims that we have used any animation in an unauthorized manner are simply false. Premise Media created the animation that illustrates cellular activity used in our film.- The Producers of “EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed”