Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

15 Resources for Atheist Bloggers

Db07 Comments

blogosphereI thought I’d compile a list of resources for Atheist bloggers which might be useful for new members of the Atheosphere or might have been overlooked by the old ones.

Joining and utilizing these services should give you more exposure and interaction. Of course it’s not a magic recipe but if you have good content that fails to get noticed this should help.

Participate

This is the first and most important tip I can give you. If you want more exposure and readers, the best thing you can do is be a part of the Atheosphere. Don’t assume that just by writing on your own blog people are going to flock to your brilliant writing. Well, it might happen but it’s going to be much more easy if you return the favour.

How do you participate? Just read what others have to say and then comment if you have something interesting to contribute. Bloggers are generally delighted to receive comments, even it it’s the occasional “well said” and if you seem to become a regular at someone’s blog, they’re bound to visit your site to see who you are and what you’re all about.

If you want to refute, analyse or improve on what someone else said, don’t leave it as a comment. Trackback instead from your own blog. Write a normal blogpost and aim a link at what someone else has written (don’t aim at their main blog unless you have to. Go for the permalink.) A trackback is sure to make the author of the original post follow it back to see what you wrote.

Finally, if you find something particularly good or interesting, do not shy from voting, sharing, redditing, digging or anywhere else he has been submitted. Indeed, subscribe in all of these services beforehand so that it’s easy to vote up people with interesting ideas. Simply, do as you’d like other to do with your posts 😉

Atheist Blogroll

This is the classic first stop for most atheist bloggers. Joining the blogroll will not give you much more than visibility at the many blogs that have it displayed. Unfortunately since technorati changed their algorithms, appearing there does not help your authority.

The Atheist Blogroll is however a resource that some of us use as a way to create or organise other services for the Atheosphere.

Planet Atheism

Many people subscribe here for their daily news reading. By joining, you’ll appear at the feed reader of many pairs of eyes so there’s not reason not to. Unfortunately lately I haven’t been able to get in contact with the admin so hopefully this is still being administered.

Carnival of the Godless

You should use the Carnival to give some of your most interesting posts more visibility. Every two weeks these are compiled into a grand carnival and presented to the world. Posts submitted to the carnival generally get around 200 views from my experience. Not much for someone already estabilished but a nice boost for the more invisible of us 🙂

Atheist Nexus

Join the Nexus and then also join the Bloggers group to find other like you. Taking part in the forum discussions is also a great way to find blogging material to write about. This is what I’m doing anyway 🙂

Technorati

Go there, claim your blog and grab some widgets. Technorati is great at giving you some accurate stats about your popularity. Many prefer the authority widget (or bragging widget as I like to call it) but for me the simple linkcount widget is enough and a nice way to see how many people have found your post interesting enough to link back to it.

Once you join Technorati do not forget to favorite your…well, favorite blogs. Bloggers love when you do that and you may be rewarded in some way 😉

You can find me here.

Twitter

This has only started getting more popular with the Atheists lately. Most use it to notify about their new blogposts but it also serves as a handy public channel for quick discussions. I’ve had many a quick answer as well as some good notifications for events of interest. And, hey, you can’t go wrong with befriending God and Satan either 😉

You can find me here and I’ve also created a delicious tag for all the atheists in twitter. Use it to quickly populate your contacts and then tag yourself.

MyBlogLog

You can pretty much see this on every blog nowadays and most people use it for the same reason, to have the nice little avatars of their recent visitors. I’ve honestly yet to find another function to it as for statistics wordpress and google analytics give me much more powerful tools and for free. Nevertheless, that widget is quite nice as you can easily discover who reads you and perhaps find some interesting new blog from there.

Still, if you find any other great use except for the visitors widget, let me know 😉

You can find me here.

Facebook Blog Networks

If you’re on Facebook and like me you don’t like to add friends you don’t actually know, the Blog Networks should be a nice alternative to show your support for your fellow atheist bloggers. Join, add your blog and join the network of the blogs you’re reading meticilously. Leave a comment and strike up a connection.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here as well as my profile.

Scoutle

This is the newest blog helping tool I’ve found. As I understand, it is quite new as well but it has some promise. I’ve blogged about it recently so I won’t repeat what I said but I think it would be a good addition to your sidebar as it’s automated and the more Atheists that join it now that it’s still new, the more visibility we’ll gain in general.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here.

Blogged

A nice way to get a rating for your blog. If your blog is not already in you can add it and in due time an editor of the site will give it a rating. It does not stop there of course as people who read you can rate and review your blog which should give you that warm fuzzy feeling. Return the favor and then everyone is happy 🙂

You can find my profile here.

Voting Services

There’s a bunch of Popularity services that many atheists use to improve their visibility. You probably know most of them already but just in case, I’m going to mention some of the more useful ones.

It is in all of our best interests to join these social networks and vote each other up. We have 750 Atheist Blogs at the moment and if just 200 of these people were active on the voting services, the atheist voice would be hitting the headlights every day. It is a sad fact that between all of us, we are still invisible.

Reddit

I found that there is a reddit devoted to atheism just recently and it seems to be quite active. I wasn’t using reddit that much before but I started just for this. The good thing about reddit is its usability. A post that has the reddit buttons (like this one *wink*wink*) can be voted up or down just with a simple click which should make the action so painless that you have no reason not to do it.

Also, even if the buttons of reddit do not exist on the blog template, by putting the bookmarklets on your toolbar, you can vote without leaving the page either. Don’t forget to be bold as well. If the article is good enough and has not been submitted, do so yourself.

The Atheist Spot

Another voting system especially for Atheism. This is quite new and still in the process of building up a readership. It’s not as easy to use as reddit but it is certainly less abused. With the addition of the handy social buttons it becomes a bit of an easier process.

Stumbleupon

You may not think it but Stumbleupon can give you significant traffic if enough people vote your articles up. The same also apply for other people who have their articles submitted. Since stumbleupon has a limit on how many times one can submit a specific site, the page author cannot do so for every one of his articles. This, if you read something interesting, press that “thumbs up” and if it’s not there, submit it.

I don’t know about the rest but I’m delighted every time I see visitors coming from stumbleupon in a new article. I always go and thank the one who submitted it 🙂 Remember that an post on stumbleupon gets more visitors depending on how many people have given it the thumbs up. My Firefox article of one year ago got 2000 visitors in the first 2 days and I’m still getting visitors now to it (just because someone voted it up again recently). So if you see something in there, give it the thumbs up.

Another way to help is join the network of atheists in stumbleupon. Not only will you find many great articles from there but the more of us that are there and vote each other’s sumbissions, the more visitors all of us get.

You can find me here.

Blogger’s Choice Awards

I’ve already written about this in depth so I won’t repeat it here. I will only mention that there has been very little activity on this front and it’s a pity. The same things I said before about mobilizing the Atheist presence on the Internet applies here too. Consider that the Atheist Nexus at the moment has 3000 members but the highest rated Atheist blog has had just 24 votes.

PMOG

This is not strictly a bloggers resource but I consider that it has great potential to increase visibility to blog articles, including the ones that were written a while ago. It also has the potential to make your web surfing a bit more enjoyable.

Epilogue

So here ends my little tour of the resources I use for my daily traves in the Atheosphere and beyond. I hope that I’ve given new bloggers some starting points and old geezers some ideas that might not have considered before. If you have anything I have missed myself, I’d love to hear it and perhaps update this small list.

Cheers!

This scoutle thingy

Db06 Comments

I am just trying out scoutle which I discovered from some random blog. Apparently it is a new service that aims to automate bringing people who might be insterested in your content, to your blog. It does this by tracking the number of visitors along with a sort of social networking where people who find each other interesting form a scoutle connection. Between these two, you get a rating. There’s also the automated scout involved which you get to personalise and give a nice name and quote (Meet the Void Seeker)

From the information:

Every time you get a visitor to your website (it does not have to be a Scoutle user) we will allow your Scout to walk two times, which will allow your Scout will meet other Scouts that are promoting their websites. The system will try only to find interesting Scouts for you to meet, based on interests, networks, connections and more. The number of Scouts your Scout meets depends on the number of visitors to your website. Also, don’t forget that when you have a visitor on your website, two other Scouts will visit as well, using the Stage you have installed.

It’s all a bit complex on first read so I didn’t understand how it works very much but since it’s automated and all I thought I’d give it a go and see what it does.

If you’re interested, give it a go and if you find the Division by Zer0 interesting just add me as a contact in scoutle. I’m curious to see what this thingamajib does.

What I’m not certain of is if the flash widget should be as visible as possible or out of the way. At the moment I’ve placed it on the bottom of my bottombar and out of the way. It means that it will load for people visiting but they are unlikely to notice it. If they are supposed to click it however, maybe I should be placing it on my sidebar.

Unfortunately my sidebar is only visible from my single post pages so someone visiting my homepage or a static page will not see it. I’m also not certain if having it appear twice (sidebar and bottombar) is a good idea :-/

Aiding the Atheist Blogroll

Db05 Comments

Like any good atheist, I’ve been trying to keep myself in the loop by monitoring the Atheosphere. Unfortunately, due to the sheer quantity of such content (At the moment, the Atheist Blogroll is at more than 700 individual active blogs) it has always been a bit overwhelming.

I’ve tried using Planet Atheism, but I quickly realised that it is tracking only a limited amount of blogs (certainly not as many as the blogroll).

I then registered to the all the Atheist blogs through the OPML for a while but that was just overwhelming, not to mention time consuming (to update the folder each time a new blog was added). I then tried simply registering to the Google Reader tag that Larro is maintaining and that was a bit easier but I still had the problem that the quantity of the posts was overwhelming. With more than 1000 posts a month it is simply impossible to find the good ones. I even tried using other services like Reddit Atheism, and Atheism Spot but these have generally very low output and generaly partisan-y.

The Bashboard of AideRSS
The Bashboard of AideRSS

In the end I just decided to see how I could fix this and fortunately, I happened upon AideRSS. After a bit of struggling and some firefox restarts (simply because of the amount of ram all the scripting ended up consuming) I managed to get it organised and ready for the godless.

How does this help? Well instead of simply seeing each and every post people are making, many of which will be not be very relevant to your interests, you can choose to limit the items you see to only the ones that have been more “popular” or succesful.

‘Ah’, I hear you say, ‘Won’t that just mean that the popular bloggers out there like will hog all the spotlight, even more than they do now? Small blogs can rarely get 5 comments on a post where, Pharyngula would be hard pressed to get less than 20.’

Have no fear. This is where the beauty of this particular system is. The posts you see when you filter by popularity, are not the most popular posts compared to other blogs but compared to other posts in the same blog. Thus while I may, on average, get 1-2 comments per post, a post that gets 10 will be considered good and one that gets, say, 30 will be well on its way to “best”. Also, since it takes into consideration diggs, del.icio.us bookmarks, linkbacks etc, you may get “popular” even without any comments at all.

This way, even though my post got 10 posts while Pharyngula’s got 100, we are both simply “good” since, compared to ther of our own respective posts, these are simple “higher than average”.

This does not mean of course that you should stop using Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon etc. On the contrary, you should keep using them because the popularity of each post is using (Well, not at the moment, but very soon I’m being told) ratings on these services as well. The only difference is that this popularity does not stay in the respective service but it helps people who use AideRSS to see the more interesting posts.

So how can you get in into that action? There’s a few ways.

  1. You can grab either the Atheist Blogroll Good posts of the Best posts OPML files that I’ve created and import them into your feed reader of choice. The Good posts will give you more content as the bar is lower.
  2. You can simply subscribe to my own Top Stories that I’ve set up on my account. I will try to keep this updated with new additions to the Atheist Blogroll.
  3. If you’re using Google Reader, just grab the plugin and you’re done 😉
  4. If you’re using NewsGator, just set your Sort Order the AideRSS Postrank.
  5. You can create an account with AideRSS, grab the original Atheist Blogroll OPML [3. Will become outdated on the next blogroll update though] and the use the import function there. Once the feeds are insterted in your account (it won’t take long as they’ve already been analyzed with my import) you can change the filter settings to what you want and grab you own customised feed. You’ll have to update your blogroll manualy with this method however. However now you can select some on low filter and others on high.

So you’ve got quite a few capabilities to work with this already. If you are getting as overwhelmed with news and posts as I am, hopefully this will help you cut down on the clutter. Plus, if you join AideRSS you can get the stats for your own site and see with one look which of your posts are the more popular. You can see the Division by Zer0 here for example.

Hope y’all find this as useful as I did 😉

Atheist Nexus Brouhaha

Db01 Comment

A Place of Peace?In the last few days it seems that there has been some commotion on the subject of the A|N in the Atheosphere. I’ve been keeping myself busy with other things and haven’t been very active in the Nexus and thus I missed the actual conversation.

What happened in short is that after the donation request, some people raised concerns regarding where the money is going, why so much is needed and other assorted questions. It seems that there is a general feeling of distrust and skepticism on this issue which I think culminated with the recent posting from the Atheist Blogger.
Adrian has since changed his opinion on this after private correspondence he had with Brother Richard but I think the whole event was for the best.

You see, I am a big supporter of transparency and furthermore I am a skeptic. It goes against my nature to simply accept someone’s word that “it’s for a good cause”. Indeed I am diametrically opposed to the following statement from the donation page:

Quite a few members have chastised me for posting the below budget. Many feel that I am being way to open and only making it easier for people to make me a target for their scorn.

If anything, I feel that there was not enough information provided in the donation page which is what led to people to question the amount of money requested. If the A|N were to not just request this amount of money, but also keeps thins secret I wouldn’t have bothered donating. Indeed I avoided donating anything before I got a breakdown of the donation amount and even then I did it conservatively as many sums were suspicious.

I can truthfully say that the only reason I donated in the first place is because I’ve already invested some time and effort to the A|N and I’ve grown to trust Richard from private conversations. However this is certainly not true for all, and Richard cannot really have one-on-one chats with every member of the Nexus in order to build up the same level of trust, and this is where transparency comes into play.

All examples of the Rational Responders or the FFRF making a lot of money and keeping things secret mean absolutely nothing to me, for I have not donated to them either. However I do believe that people who donate to those causes do so because of the level of trust and goodwill the people in charge have built up. The A|N OTOH is very new in all this and there is basically very little reason for people to donate – until that trust and goodwill has had time to grow.

For each vocal person like Adrian Hayter, who comes out and declares the reasons why he is leaving or not donating, you can be certain that there will be 100 silent ones who have the exact same concerns. I had many of the exact same questions with regards to the donation breakdown but instead of driving me to write about it, I decided to wait and see.

For this reason, the A|N team should be actually glad that someone voiced these concerns. By having someone challenge the donation drive and ask for questions, we (the silent majority) have now a much more clear idea of what is going on and can decide either way. Indeed having such a “detractor” admit publicly that he was wrong, is a good thing in the long run. It is in A|N’s best interest to encourage skepticism, not hide it.

I think Vjack put it best:

Frankly, those who seem determined to stick their heads in the sand bother me more than those asking tough questions. I am an atheist, but I was a skeptic first. To see dissent and skepticism discouraged in a community of atheists is surprising. The investigation was the right thing to do, and people should keep asking questions until they have been answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

Do not put your head in the sand and do not expect freethinkers to follow the religious motif of giving 10% of their income unquestionably. Yes, the respect to authority and the blind trust for “benevolent dictators” give the religious front much power and influence, but it is also part of their weakness.

You will never get the same behaviour from people like me, but make an effort to earn maintain our trust and 10% might start looking too little.

ComplexLife

Db0

window peeksSo finally my very first WordPress plugin is accepted into the official plugins repository 🙂

This is a historic event. I’m certain that fame and fortune will not be very far back!

In case you haven’t seen my recent page about it and you don’t care to read it, Complexlife is a lifestreaming plugin which is a fork from SimpleLife (You see what I did there? 😛 ).

After adding a lot of features and options to it and seeing that Simplelife is not progressing I thought I’d go ahead and just upload it as a new version. This will allow me to have a more organised development and also have the help of anyone who wishes to improve it.

I’ve already got a few features I want to add and I’m also going to be merging changes from other places where I find them, i.e. the trumblog.

So if you’ve got a self-hosted WordPress blog, give it a go and let me know what you think. I’m eager for feedback.

Μέρα της Λίνουξαρτησίας

Db0

Σε περίπτωση που δεν το ακούσατε ακόμα, τo πρώτο Lindependence τελείωσε με επιτυχία. Για μια μικρή πόλη στις Η.Π.Α. τα αποτελεσματα ήταν πολύ θετικά και η προσωπική μου άποψη είναι ότι θα βοηθήσει στην “word-of-mouth” διαφήμιση του GNU/Linux όσον αφορα το desktop.

Ο λόγος όμως που γράφω αυτό το κείμενο δεν είναι απλά για να διαφημίσω αυτή την πολύ σωστή κίνηση αλλά για να επιστήσω την προσοχή σας στο πόσο πολύ το αγνόησε η κοινότητα του Λίνουξ.

Απο μεγάλους κόμβους στόν τεχνολογικό κόσμο (Slashdot, O’Reilly) μέχρι αφοσιομένες στο Gnu/Linux ιστοσελίδες (Linux Journal, FSF), η αντίδραση ήταν μια απαθής αδιαφορία! Πέρα απο μερικά σημεία όπως το LXer, σχεδόν πουθενά αλλού δεν είδα, αν όχι ενθουσιασμό, τουλάχιστον μια απλή ανακοίνωση. Αντίθετως πολλοί είναι αυτοί που συγκεκριμένα απέφυγαν να το ανακοινώσουν.

Το όλο θέμα είναι λυπηρό. Είμαστε μια (σχετικά) μικρή και αποκεντροποιημένη κοινότητα που δεν έχουμε κανένα άλλο για υποστήριξη εκτώς απο τα μέλη μας. Είναι εντελός αντι-διαισθητικό να κινούμαστε σε τέτοιες κατευθύνσεις μόνο και μόνο επειδή δεν συμφωνούμε με τις πρωτοβουλίες που παίρνουν οι άλλοι. Ειδικά τα μεγάλα μέλη ενημέρωσης για οτιδήποτε Λίνουξ θα πρέπει να είναι αγνωστικά στο τι παρουσιάζουν σαν νέα, εφόσον έχουν να κάνουν με το θέμα.

Δεν υπάρχει κανένας λόγος να μην αναφέρουν, έστω και αν συντομία, οτι η Μέρα Λινουξαρτησίας “θα γίνει την Τάδε μέρα” ή ότι “έγινε με επιτυχία”. Κανένας. Το να μην το αναφέρεις καν είναι μια ένδειξη μικρότητας και συμφωνώ με αυτούς που πιστεύουν οτι η ζηλεία είναι ο υπαίτιος. Γιατί δεν το κατάφεραν οι ίδιοι…

Όπως τα έφεραν οι εξελίξεις, ο Ήλιος (Helios) και οι συνεργάτες του τα κατάφεραν μια χαρά αλλά η ελειψη οποιασδήποτε βοήθειας έβλαψε αρκετά τον ενθουσιασμό τους. Ελπίζω μόνο να συνεχίσουν με τον ίδιο ρυθμό και να μην το βάλουν κάτω γιατί πραγματικά εμπνέουν πολλούς μας αλλά και το γεγονός οτι κάνουν την θεωρία πράξη μπορεί να αλλάξει και γνώμες.

Με αλληλεγγύη…

Help Drigg

Db0

Just for your information y’all, Drigg, the wonderful software that can give us the power of Digg not only in a way that anyone can use it but also more ethical, is having resource issues. Simply, the current (and only) developer is fastly approaching burnout and the development could reach a halt.

Honestly, I think that would abe a significant loss as the drigg software (and generally the digg idea) promises so much more capability and when paired with the Open Source model, we can make it so much better.

For example, I was just thinking how great an idea it would be to merge together the Atheist Blogroll, Planet Atheism and The Atheist Spot while also twisting the concept in a more interesting way. The ultimate goal would be to allow people to be able to read and vote on the best stories of the day from all atheist blogs without having to submit everything and hopefully without having to visit a specific place to vote (More on this in a future post).

To that end I was hoping that I could start off with Drigg but now that I see that the development might end, I am saddened.
Unfortunately, I also do not have any real programming skills so I can’t really take over that duty 🙁

So if you are a developer and want to help with a promising project, head over and volunteer some of your time and perhaps we can create the ultimate place for atheist content.

KnowMore

Db0

Finally! I just discovered a site, the type of which I was looking for quite a while.

Knowmore is a mediawiki based site who’s aim is to raise awareness of corporate abuse and actions and generally to create more informed consumers who avoid supporting companies with a track record of corruption.

The funny thing is that I was having an idea for the same thing a few months back but looking around the web, I couldn’t find anything relevant. I knew that I couldn’t have been the first to think of this but without any such place I was honestly thinking of starting it myself. Fortunately, I was right. Other had thought of it before me and had created something already that is much, much better than I ever expected.

Not only is KnowMore wiki based and open for edits for everyone, not only does it already have an estabilished community but it also has a great firefox extension that will inform you of company abuses when you visit their website, when you see their result in google or when you are about to buy their product on online shops (currently amazon only)

It is actually through their extension that I discovered Knowmore as I was looking for more kewl plugins to add to my wonderful, wonderful browser. I am actually surprised that not more people are talking about it. I mean, I just checked and it seems that there are 0 blogs linking to it!

Anyway, I’m very excited to have found this resource. It was desperately needed in this day & age where croynism and corruption run rampart. Did you know for example, that Coca Cola has problems in pretty much all areas of concern? Worker Rights, Croynism, Environment, you name it.

So, to cut this short, at the very least, just go and install the extension on your browser and then forget about it. You’ll only get informed when there is something wrong and then you at least have the chance to avoid it. If you have information on a company OTOH, just head over there and put it in and help the rest of us know.