Well, this blog has finally cracked and gone to WP 2.3.3 (as heather mentioned previously). However this has not been without problems, so please be patient if it occasionally seems weird here. We are trying to rectify the tagging but as I am not convinced many people used it a lot I doubt that will cause many problems. There are one or two other hurdles to cover that may mean things display strange for a while but (fingers crossed) we have caught most of them! Thanks for your patience.
Category Archives: asides
Quiet
I’ve noticed that there has been a massive drop off on comments recently. It seems strange, especially as Heather has been as prolific as normal (albeit commenting on non-atheist blogs more than usual) and I have been trying to comment a lot since I got back. Is this a naturally quiet period or have people given up commenting?
Sorry, Rowan Williams
I have now been forcibly convinced that this blog blithely joined the rest of the UK – wow, does this mean we’ve finally grown up – in misrepresenting what Rowan Williams said about shari’a law.
I am tempted to blame the BBC, to let myself off the ethical hook. “I was just following the BBC story. They are supposed to be objective and accurate……” This is a lame excuse, of course, especially as the BBC story did have a link to his actual speech. (I tried to read it and it was too boring after a brief skim.)
All the more reason to plug season 5 of the Wire with its (so far) great treatment of the role of the press in misleading us all. (Maybe I should start listening to my own words, sometimes.)
Happy New Year!
In case neither Heather or myself get the chance before tomorrow (GMT of course), this is just a quick Happy New Year to all our readers – even those whose calendars don’t change over at midnight 🙂 . We will try to get back into the swing of lots of ranting about idiocy as soon as the holiday season allows us.
Seasons Greetings
Well, happy christmas or whatever you wish to celebrate at this time of year. For me, saturnalia is a good enough reason to not let the theists steal our holidays!
Seasonal Downtime
Well it is the middle of winter now (literally) and both Heather and I are getting tied up in celebrations for what must be the Festival of Seaxneat, as being devout atheists we don’t “celebrate” christmas……….. Seriously, we will still be blogging over the next two weeks but as we both have a lot of travel to put up with our online time will be limited. Hope every one has a happy [insert chosen holiday here] and a great new year [except for those whose calendar doesn’t mark a new year in 10 days time…] 🙂
This blog is twinned with …
How predictable are we atheists? The last post here is the alternate reality twin of one by psychoatheist which seems to have been posted at more or less the same time, though his post appeared on the Atheist blogroll… grr… etc.. And we’ve both put almost the same title…. Nullifidian is right. We need a schedule….
Dawkins on BBC
Quick reminder: The BBC are planning to have Richard Dawkins as their guest on “Have your say” which will be at 1406 GMT on Sunday, 9 Dec 07. You can leave comments or find out more on the BBC site about this.
Annoying Blogroll
Despite wordpress automatically pinging and us manually pinging Blogrolling.com as well as using Ping-O-Matic at 15 – 30 minute intervals, not one of the previous five posts have been shown on the Atheist Blogroll. Now, the blogroll is a wonderful thing and we here at WhyDontYou want to fully support it, but the fact remains it is not working properly. As it stands, blogs no longer get Technorati ranking from it which means its main purpose is to send traffic to a site. Most people use the abbreviated version showing the most recently updated blogs. As it now seems to ignore the good blogs when they update, oddly showing a **new next to all the content-free/YouTube blogs, it is becoming less and less useful. If I had the technical know-how to propose a solution, I would, but surely there must be, somewhere in AtheistLand, a person with the required knowledge to solve the problem? Anyone?
Painfully Stupid Commenters
This is just a quick aside to follow up my previous post, I have read a few more comments on Simon Jenkins’ article and they are so painfully stupid – yet worryingly representative of public thought – that I am going to have to blog about them again soon. If you don’t believe me about the idiots, read the times online article.
Upgrade Stalled
It looks like not enough people made the correct devotions to Hermes and now we are not going to try and upgrade the blog this weekend. Heather has been sidelined by a cold and a fair amount of work and my internet access time is approaching the bare minimum. When we have more time we will look at what is required with the upgrade and give it ago. Please, keep making sacrifices to Ukko though.
Upgrade Time
Just to let you know we are planning to upgrade to WordPress 2.3 over the weekend. As this is likely to change a lot of our plugins (such as Ultimate Tag Warrior), there may be some problems with the site while this happens. Please be patient and pray to Hermes that we get up and running again without any problems.
Comments and commenting
After the success of our recent blog comment week, it seems things have dropped off again. As a result off this we will be looking at another comment week soon, as well as making personal efforts to comment on other blogs more often in general. I would be interested in hearing how other feel about comments – do they motivate authors? Do you prefer comments or track backs? And so on. Please let me know what you think.
Nulls Back
In case you have missed it, Nullifidian is back blogging – today with a nice catch of Archbishop Rowan Williams claiming that he cant come to terms with humans being created for a “Purpose.” Brilliant. Well worth reading.
WordPress Upgrade Time
Just a reminder for all WordPress users out there. Version 2.2.2 has now been released and, as this is a security upgrade, it probably makes sense to upgrade now.