A resource wiki just for the Atheosphere

Would you like to have a place where all information relevant to Atheist Blogging would be gathered and constantly updated for your benefit? Well for the last few months ((Well, more like days of actual work, as the whole thing stayed basically idle for most of its existence)) me and Larro have been working exactly on such project to provide some help for Atheists, especially the bloggers but not excluding those who take a more passive look.

I conceived the idea once I noticed the large number of resources, ideas and tips that existed and the many ways that bloggers had put them to user. For example, the simple concept of a blogroll had allowed the Atheist Blogroll to exist, from which many other stuff could be based on such as a search engine in atheist blogs or optimized reading lists. Furthermore, many atheists were blogging about ways to use the various tools online, such as Technorati, Reddit, Stumbleupon and the like.

But all this information was dispersed and difficult to find, especially for people who were just joinging the game. So it would be a great idea to have a centralized place where all such information would be gathered and through crowdsourcing improved over time to be as comprehensive as possible.

Thus, the Atheist Resources project was born.

At the moment, this project is still in very early infancy and up to now it’s been mostly me and Larro who’ve been adding to it. I’ve been concentrating on the Toolkit while Larro on the Blog Directory (and the site layout). The former is to allow people to discover useful stuff for their sites while the later is to add a bit of self-management to the Atheist Blogroll and easy updating.

The project is based on the excellent DocuWiki software with a theme that approximates the Wikipedia one (I guess to make the whole thing more familiar. The wiki format should allow us to easily add, remove and update information without fear of losing it and without having to go through a difficult approval process. Everyone is welcome to join.

Of course, this won’t go anywhere fast with only just 2 people on it, so I think it’s about time that I put out the word on the Atheosphere and invite y’all to join. Strangely I’m not the first to mention this as the Jewmanist somehow discovered its existence early and blogged about it already. Unfortunately this didn’t elicit much of a response.

So what is the current functionality? Well of course it’s a wiki so you’ll be able to quickly add and edit anything. I’ve also enabled pingback functionality which means that when the AR links to a blog, it will appear (if this functionality exists – yes, I’m looking at you Blogspot) and when a blog links tot he AR, this will appear on the site as well. This way if someone writes on a topic, say, Technorati, and links to the AR, theit entry will show on the Technorati page for people looking for this information to follow.

Then there’s tags, which is something I’m hoping might become useful for sites listed on the Blogroll. Through them, one should be able to see which Atheist Blogs write about a particular subject and visit them. Along with all the information that should be present on each Blog’s listing, this should enable people to find Atheist bloggers with similar interests easily.

And that’s just the begginging. I’m hoping that with all these brillliant Freethinkers out there, we can make this something unique and useful. So I hope to see you all there.