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One month of Planet Atheism

Published

on February 9, 2007

. 6 Comments

Planet Atheism (info on joining), my aggregator of atheism-related blogs, was launched exactly one month ago today. It has steadily increased in number of blogs (41, as I write this), and readership is on the rise, too.

During this month, there were technical changes as well; for instance, from time to time, a post didn’t close its HTML tags properly, and its formatting “spilled over” to other posts after it. I spent about 2 days finding a way to deal with it, and I believe I’ve succeeded, now. Some software versions were also updated, but you probably don’t care about that.

Personally, I have enjoyed PA so far, for two reasons: one, I, myself, have a place to read more than 40 very interesting blogs every day. It’s usually the first web page I open, in the morning. To me, this is a much better way to keep up with those blogs than using individual RSS feeds, or opening 40 blogs every day. Some of the member’s blogs I already followed; others were new, fascinating discoveries.

The other reason is more “human”: I love to see posts saying “I found this link on PA”, or comments saying “Hi, I found your blog on PA; here’s what I think of your post…”. I love the feeling of having created something that other people, too, enjoy and find useful.

Anyway, I’d like to ask you some questions:

if you have a blog, and are on PA, what do you think of the experience? Has your readership gone up? Are there new people commenting?
if you have a blog (related to atheism), and are not on PA, any reasons for that? (You can always ask me to remove you later, if you don’t like the experience… )
do you read PA? If not, why not?
if you read PA, how do you do it? Visit it once a day? More than once? Use its RSS feed (which I provide, but I don’t use myself - I don’t like reading feeds with too many posts a day, but reading them on a single web page works for me)?
have you discovered any new blogs through PA, that you currently enjoy reading?
do you often click on a post’s link to go to the individual post and comment, or to watch YouTube videos (which don’t show up in PA)? (You were aware you could do so, right? )
any suggestions for improving PA?

I appreciate any replies.

Finally, if a friend of yours has an atheism-related blog, why not suggest that him or her join PA?

Planet Atheism: a very short rant…

Published

Pedro Timóteo

on January 13, 2007

in planet atheism

. 4 Comments

Why, oh, why is it that so many bloggers, especially on Blogger, don’t have any contact information anywhere on their blogs?

(There. Rant over. :))

I’ve already invited some to Planet Atheism (which, incidentally, already aggregates 9 great blogs, and this one too! :)) by placing a comment on the newest post. But… I don’t like doing it, I think it’s rude to post off-topic comments, and I’m afraid that this may annoy bloggers who might otherwise be interested.

So, here’s a few humble requests:

1- if you have an atheism-related blog, and want it included in PA, please let me know (I’ve created a new email address for it, join@planetatheism.com). If it’s mostly about atheism and the problems of religion, I’ll add it.

I’m still inviting a couple more people in the next few days, but that will probably stop soon - again, because I don’t want to be annoying.

2- if you have one such blog, if it’s not too much work, please look in the “Spam” or “Junk” folders in your email accounts; you may already have an invitation there. Email filters tend not to “like” new domains, as is the case here, so it may have been wrongly tagged as spam. It would help if you opened it and clicked on “Not Spam” or “Not Junk”, to teach the filter that it isn’t a spam domain.

However, as I said, there’s really no need to wait for an invitation; if you have an atheist blog, just let me know about it.

3- if your blog makes it impossible to contact you without posting an off-topic comment, you should correct that … for your sake, not mine, and not merely for this particular case.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…

EDIT: there is now a Planet Atheism permanent page, linked just below the logo. It includes some more technical stuff, too.

Good and bad news

Published

Pedro Timóteo

on January 10, 2007

in planet atheism and way of the mind (site)

. 2 Comments

The good news is that Planet Atheism now has 5 (*) blogs. Not bad for 12 hours. I’ve already started to send some invitations to candidate blogs, but I’m doing it slowly, so don’t feel offended if you haven’t been invited yet. Still, there’s no reason to wait; if you’re interested, let me know (details here).

The bad news is that the server where this blog was hosted, apparently, couldn’t cope with the StumbleUpon effect of so many hits per second. Who’d guess that my 16 Common Myths about Atheists post would get so popular again? Therefore, I had to temporarily move Way of the Mind to my old server, located at my home in Portugal. Bandwidth may be worse (though it should still be OK), but the server itself is much more powerful, and it laughs at the StumbleUpon effect.

I’ve contacted the hosting people for a server upgrade, and in a couple of days (hopefully) this blog should be physically in the U.S. again. Other sites such as the forum and Planet Atheism are still in the American server.

Is it too obvious that I’m a sysadmin as well as a blogger?

(*) 7 now.