Pie Palace

When OC Transpo tried to prevent atheist ads from appearing on buses, I started thinking a bit more about my philosophy. I’m an atheist. In general, I have no problem with religion, as long as people don’t use it as a weapon against others (that’s a shout-out to you al Qaeda! And you too, Jerry), or as an excuse to harm themselves (I’m looking at you, Jehovah’s Witnesses). So, as an atheist, I thought I’d start reading what other atheists had to say.

And I got bored.

There are plenty of atheist blogs out there, but they spend a lot of time talking about religion. Like 99.9% of their time. I don’t get it. Consider how far women’s magazines would have gotten if they spent all their time talking about how lame men are. Or where Sports Illustrated would be if every issue was “Chess sucks!” Or if Playboy was full of pictures of naked guys, just to show how ugly men are.

I’m an atheist. If you want me to read your blog, stop writing about religion.

I ended up emailing Ebon, who posts to Daylight Atheism. I asked him why there was so much religion on his blog. In response, he wrote back:

First is the trivial answer: [...] I keep a cache of posts that I wrote some time earlier and can release at my convenience, so the site doesn’t go dark for too long. Since these stored posts have to be timeless, many of them are about philosophical or theological topics rather than current events. [...] I think it helps to be a knowledgeable and well-equipped atheist, and I find human culture fascinating no matter how it manifests itself.

Second, and maybe more importantly: While I do write about positive atheism and humanism as often as possible, I want to maintain a balance. And one thing I’ve found is that posts which pick a fight, or disassemble an argument, often get more hits and more attention than posts which promote atheism as a positive worldview. [...] That’s not something I’m thrilled about, but that’s how it is. I don’t want my site to be all arguing all the time, but to keep things lively, it does help to stir the pot on occasion.

(I’ve abridged his response – I’ll post the whole thing in the comments)

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading his Contributions of Freethinkers series, and some of the other posts up there. But I just don’t care about the fiddly bits of Christianity, and how demonstrably wrong they are.

I hope this is a phase in the growth of atheism. Many posters to these blogs talk about “deconversion”¹ or how they decided that religion wasn’t for them. My hope is that these are first generation atheists who are reacting against their upbringing, and that their kids will be able to be atheists who don’t care about religion, and are able to write blogs that can talk about atheism itself.

It’s too bad. I enjoy my atheism because it doesn’t force me into anything. I enjoy being able to construct my own morality. I enjoy being ethically responsible to myself. I’d like to see what my fellow atheists think about their newfound world view. I’d love to know what society would be like if atheism was the dominant philosophy. It’s a pity that I haven’t been able to find a blog that scratches that itch.

1. For a well written deconversion story, take a look at Confessions of an Atheist. (back)

For those who don’t know “QuickPress” is the admin widget that allows you to blog from your Wordpress dashboard. The latest Miniposts revision (0.6.10) adds a minipost checkbox to the QP widget. Thanks to Lan for suggesting this.

Have you ever wished, fellow blogger, that you had a way to tell your readers when you comment on somebody else’s blog? I have. Whenever I comment on dubroy.com (for example), I’d like my blog to show that I did that.

I’ve put together the Elsewhere plugin to do that magic. When you comment on a blog with Elsewhere installed, that blog will ping the URL you entered in the ‘Website’ field on the comment form. If that website has Elsewhere installed, a link to your comment will be displayed in your sidebar.

Miniposts 0.6.8 is now out. It’s another fix release that removes post duplication issues, cleans up the preferences page, and fixes a couple of bugs with the smiley code that nataan contributed.

The big news is that the miniposts plugin is now hosted on Wordpress autoinstallation site, meaning that installation and upgrades should be easy peasy. Since this is my first hosted plugin, I’ve taken a quickie screenshot, so I can remember when my plugin’s average rating was 5/5:

This is my five hundredth published post on Pie Palace. That doesn’t include the half written drafts, nor the posts I deleted before publishing. But it does include:

• My first post, which, unsurprisingly complains that reporters are all too human. And adept at missing the real story behind an event.
• The coverage of the 2006 Green Party Leadership Race. And my complaining when David Chernushenko came in second.
• My eulogy for Rosa Parks. My belief that people who don’t know how to write also don’t know how to read was confirmed by the first comment. (Why bother to write a response when you haven’t bothered to read the post?)
• Waaay too many Green Party posts.
• Posts about my pet projects: Blogawa and engagement announcement.
• The progress of my masters thesis.

• I’ve seen fit to comment on 116 good things, but only 81 bad things. In the worst case, that means I’m an optimist.
• Only 26% (134 of 500 posts) are marked as being self absorbed, meaning I have to start commenting on my breakfast more often.
• My first post was in January, 2005. I’ve posted roughly once every two days. I clearly need a life.

Except for the occasional slip, I’ve managed to avoid posting personal information, compromising pictures, nudity, LOLcats, useless links, and drunken rants. I’ll try to do something about that over the next 500 posts.

Image credit: Mrs Magic.

A Don Miller post has inspired my to try a new posting style. Each post is a series of short paragraphs that are grouped. Each grouping has a leading factual paragraph that lays out a set of arguments, and is followed by zero or more shorter paragraphs that have my reaction. The notable typographical difference is that paragraphs with a clear thesis sentence have that sentenced bolded. It’s the first writing style that seems to be developed for thar webbertubes. Thoughts? Comments?

One of the neat things about Facebook is its complete transparency. When a user comments on something, it’s displayed on their friends’ event list.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for blogs. If I comment on a blog, I’ll leave my email address and URL, but there’s no traceability on my blog. Readers of my blog won’t know that I found another post interesting enough to post a comment.

It would be nice if there was a trackback mechanism for comments. When I write a comment and submit my blog’s URL, I’d like my blog to be notified. After I okay the trackback, I’d like it to be available as a widget on my blog and (optionally) written to my blog’s general RSS feed.

Piepalace.ca has been spanked by more than its fair share of hits recently. Usually, I would just assume that I’m really popular and leave it at that, but Dreamhost has been getting increasingly upset at the load these hits are putting on their server.

Some simple analysis (with the help of the Dreamhost support wiki) has shown a couple of weird trends:

• 207.58.129.221 really likes me.¹ It downloads my RSS feed 800-1100 times a day.²
• The Aspie Quotient test is pretty popular. It gets literally thousands of visits a day. It’s basically a static page that relies on javascript for processing, but I’m afraid that Wordpress is still falling down under the load.

I’ve blacklisted our friend at 207.58.129.221, and I’m using WP Super Cache. Hopefully this will lessen my load to appease Dreamhost.

Can anyone recommend a decent apache logfile analyzer? Preferably something that runs on the commandline and doesn’t leave HTML turds all over the place.

1. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks IP addresses by the number of requests they’ve made. (back)
2. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks URLs by the number of requests they received. (back)

Blogs are pretty neat. They allow a user to produce a stream of time-specific posts, that automatically appear in subscribers’ RSS readers. But every post on a blog looks the same.

That doesn’t make sense. Let’s say that I write movie reviews on my blog – I want every review to include the movie poster, a link to the movie’s website, and a star rating. With Wordpress, I’d have to hand craft every post to contain that information. Hand crafting is easy to screw up, boring to do, and hard to change in future.

What if we give each post a skin? When the user is writing the post, they can say “this is a movie review”, and Wordpress is smart enough to ask for the website link, star rating, and link to the movie poster. When Wordpress serves that post up, it’s wrapped in a special blob of HTML that renders the links and stars properly.

You’ve noticed that I’m talking movie reviews. Does that ring a bell? Perhaps about microformats? If we’re careful when we sculpt the skin for our review, it can include a hReview, meaning that a web crawler can detect a review and index it appropriately.

chameleon is a first cut at skinning. It’s missing a little javascript goop (to show movie posters and hide some stuff on the post editing page), but it’s functional, supporting hReview and hCalendar by default.

It might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: blogs are about communication. Communication isn’t the same thing as dissemination/syndication, as it implies that readers can participate in a post with critiques, questions, and additional information. Reader participation makes a blog more than simple announcements, it elevates a blog from a simple homepage¹ to being a bazaar of ideas.

Participation can take many forms: comments being the most immediate (since the reader can easily browse them when reading the article); but automatic backlinking works too (see pingbacks). The irony is that adding that kind of a system to a blog makes it intrinsically more interesting, both to the reader and the writer.

Rant trigger: some guy presents an idea without any mechanism of receiving feedback. Honourable mention: dmo asks for tips on his blog, without providing a mechanism for readers to comment..

1. Remember homepages? Shambling monstrosities constructed of dead links, animated gifs, and text surrounded by <blink> tags. (back)