Why Dont You Blog?

As part of the drive to improve the quality, and quantity, of the photos on the blog, here are two more - taken in December 2006, with a Nokia N73 mobile phone with the first using the “negative” settings.
Let us know what you think.

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A couple of days ago I made a post titled “Atheist Resurgance” which was written after I had been meandering around the results of some technorati tag searches.

One of these links took me to a blog titled “Sub Ratione Dei: A Balanced Victory” where I read some of the comments made about Richard Dawkins, and his book The God Delusion. In the post, I made the following comments:

A theology student who feels that, as a theology student he is more placed to talk about God than Dawkins. This is interesting as the God delusion is not about the Christian deity per se, but about the implications belief in a divine being have on humanity and the biological evidence which contradicts those beliefs. Maybe the author of Sub Ratione Dei feels that as a theology student they are more placed to discuss evolution and creationism than Dawkins.

Following my post here, the author of the Sub Ratione Dei blog has made the following response:

Update: This post has generated a little comment over on Why Don’t You … Blog? For one they are maybe taking me a bit too seriously (alway’s a mistake). However, I am perhaps more worried by the implicit message that I am a creationist!

Now, this isn’t the first time I have been challenged over an apparent mistake I made in a blog post, and it is unlikely to be the last, so I want to try and set the record straight here.

I didn’t think I had taken the Sub Ratione Dei post all that seriously and it was meant as humour then I apologise whole heartedly for my mistake. I never thought my post had made any implication about belief in creation, it was put in there with the evolution bit.

Critically, my comments about the Sub Ratione Dei blog post were quite minimal, I only pointed out that the Theologist felt he was better placed to discuss God than Richard Dawkins and that he was critiquing a book which he hadn’t read. The rest of the entry was a cut and paste from the original site. The God delusion book is not about a specific religion, although there are obvious Christian overtones, the principles made are equally sound if the religion in question was Zoroastrianism, Norse Gods, Roman Gods etc. Richard Dawkins may well be a “grumpy old man” but I am not so sure he has no idea what he is talking about.

Anyway, this post and the previous post, were not made with the intention of insulting anyone or starting a blog version of a flame war. I was simply aiming to highlight the disparate views which blogs with a certain tag can generate (in this instance it was Richard Dawkins). If I have caused any offence, then I do apologise.

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Well, as the lightbox seems to have worked so well, I thought it was time to make the most of it and get some more photos online Needless to say, I am going to be looking over Technorati to see what else lightbox turns up Sadly, this is not a “high traffic” tag term, and only gets about 1-3 posts a day. Still, times may change.

This is a photograph of a house next to the stones at Avenbury.

These are some photographs of Farleigh Hungerford Castle taken in July 06.

Over time, we will look at editing some of the photo collections at Why Dont You… and showing off the results here. Feel free to get in touch and let us know what you think - or if you have a similar blog and want us to link to you!

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As part of Admin’s site overhaul, I have been trying to add some of the cool word press widgets to the side bar here. So far, they have pretty much all turned out to be fairly pointless so the current crop are somewhat, erm, minimal

I did find what looked like an excellent widget to install (the cool looking “Flickr Widget“), and was duly pointed to the repository at http://www.redalt.com/External/plugins.php?p=flickr-widget. This is where things went wrong. The redalt site (which incidentally, lots of links point to for downloads) is totally unresponsive. Not only is it slow to use but none of the links actually result in downloads. Sheer madness.

However, there is another place you can find the widget - http://svn.wp-plugins.org/flickr-widget/trunk/ - and as of right now, this is working fine

By the way, it is an excellent widget!

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Aside - Whydontyou has a new blog style - please let us know what you think. The current style is based on http://wpthemepark.com/themes/fallseason/ but it may change again as we are experimenting with several options.

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WhyDontYou has added a few new features to it’s posts - the main one is a “light box” for inline images (note: this does not include the images on Flickr and the like).

To see how this works, click on these images:

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Aside - just to let you know, we have now added a sitemap function to the blog.

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CompuSkills web design service has put together a “customer service” blog which will provide advice, information and responses to frequently asked questions.

Definitely worth checking out over the coming weeks and months. If you have any questions you would like to have answers please get in touch with CompuSkills and see what can be done.

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It might just be me, but my recent surf through technorati philosophy blogs (mentioned here first and then here) turned up some interesting results. In addition to the topical ones I have already mentioned, there seems a massively disproportionate number of MySpace blogs on the topic.

Seriously, pretty much nine out of ten links I have followed (the list was sorted by “freshness”) have been to MySpace blogs. Some are serious and relevant (for example this one about law and freedom - valid points even though I support banning smoking!) but by and large they are the “philosopical musings” of bored teenagers (even when written by apparent adults like this Wonder Woman religion post….).

I wonder if that pretty much sums up MySpace….

On a technological note, Technorati is still annoying. It is taking 20 minutes to index posts here, which ensures that when they do arrive in the index they are very, very far down the list in a busy topic like Philosophy. What are the other (generally MySpace) sites doing to get indexed within a minute or two?

Just to clarify the second paragraph above, out of the first fifty links tagged “Philosophy” on Technorati, only ONE was not a MySpace blog… Blimey.

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It seems I posted the last article in haste as there is a new contender for the most “off the wall” philosophy tagged blog.

Take a look at this blinder (from Enigma, another MySpace user…)

As a Buddhist, I practice Nichiren Daishonin’s buddhism. I’ve been quite open about it up until a few months ago. Where I work, there are a few other people who I recently found out practic the same type of buddhism. However, there is one person - who I don’t know at all who has been imposing what I can only describe as anonymous guerrilla tactics to get other people to become aware of this practice. They have been posting magazines to the work place, which has annoyed some members of staff and leaving books around to people with messages like ‘lord knows, you bloody need it!’ That sort of shit. Not necessary. I have tried to find out who it is but to no avail.In this practice, it is through forging genuine friendships with people and showing some sort of example yourself as a human being that you introduce others, not by force or by some underhand tactics or other. It annoyed me…

ps - Anyone have any questions about Nichiren Buddhism, just ask me….:)

That is it. The wonders of MySpace seem to prevent me from looking at any other posts made to try and put this into context.

It really has left me stumped as to what “she” is going on about.

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