Yes, I plead guilty.

Planet Atheism hasn’t been maintained by me for a while (several months, in fact). I used to sometimes let new additions “accumulate”, but for the last few months I’ve let my PA email folder grow (and grow and grow), so that I currently have more than 110 blogs waiting to be added. I’ve also had requests for address changes that I haven’t replied to yet.

And, yes, this is mostly due to laziness on my part. I had also been waiting for a new version of FeedWordPress which would fix the duplicate posts problem, and allow me to upgrade WordPress to its newer versions, but, apparently, the FWP author has been as lazy as myself, so that excuse went down the drain. :)

Anyway, more than 100 new blogs would mean that PA would double in size, and size is already a problem: the number of posts per day means that it’s almost impossible to read every post, and the front page changes too quickly (yes, I don’t like reading PA in an aggregator – call me weird).

A possible solution is to create “Planet Atheism 2” (the name will probably be different), which will have all the new blogs. This is a far from perfect solution, as it forces people to read two separate sites (or aggregate two feeds), but I think it’s better than the alternative; a 200-blog aggregator simply doesn’t work. Imposing a tag system, or something similar, would force bloggers to change their way of blogging, and that would never do.

I’ll have news soon. And, again, sorry for my laziness.

As more than one member / reader has complained about, there are currently some intermittent problems on Planet Atheism. Added to the occasional "duplicate" post, there's a new one now: some posts are linked to the wrong blog, and usually to a very old post.

I've been deleting and re-adding those manually, but it's happening more and more, which suggests that it's size-related. I'll try to contact the author of FeedWordPress again, and let's hope that a solution can be found. If not, I'll probably have to change software... again. :(

Meanwhile, all I can do is ask you to be patient, and I hope you still find PA useful, even with these temporary problems.

Pedro

This morning, when I was checking Planet Atheism, as I always do (like I've always said, I created it mostly for selfish reasons: I love reading what other atheist bloggers write, in a convenient place :)), I found a couple of references to ChallengeReligion.com. What's this, I thought? A new competitor?

So, naturally, I checked. Here are my first impressions: ChallengeReligion (CR from now on) is an interesting mix of a Digg, a Technorati, and a normal aggregator such as PA. It's like Digg because posts are ranked by popularity, like Technorati because it measures "popularity" according to incoming links from other blogs (unlike Digg, where people vote), and like an aggregator because you can then read posts from there -- though they only publish excerpts. I believe they do the latter because, unlike PA, they didn't ask permission from the bloggers; since they just publish excerpts, it's OK, I guess.

Oh, and it looks quite good, which is no surprise, as they have a whole team behind it... and many others. Yes, CR is just one of many Digg/Technorati/aggregators; they have others, about many different subjects. More power to them. :) I could create PA clones in minutes, too (though it would take time to get member blogs, since I prefer full aggregation, and that implies asking first).

It may be useful as a source of extra traffic, but it's not useful to me, because... "all together now..." I like to read blogs in a convenient place. :) Also, while the posts populary feature is interesting, it may also have its drawbacks; for instance, what if a blogger is publishing a series of posts, the first appears there, but the next ones aren't linked enough, and therefore never appear?

Note that I'm not actually criticizing CR or saying that there's something wrong with the concept; I just prefer a normal aggregator, which to me works like the "morning newspaper" (or afternoon, or evening, or whenever I open the page :)).

Yup. I was tired of the incredibly slow speed, RSS feed problems, and other annoying stuff. So I spent this morning migrating Planet Atheism to WordPress, using an aggregating plugin. I even changed the theme so that it looks like the old PA. :)

The good stuff:

- no more slo-o-o-owness (as in more than 1 minute to load the page)
- no more limits to the number of aggregated blogs
- a more "current" piece of software (WordPress is frequently updated, highly popular, and very well supported)
- no more hiccups with the RSS feed
- (this is mostly for me) no need to use a separate web server so that Simplepie memory leaks don't affect the rest of the sites.
- a search feature
- real, permanent archives (don't worry, every archived post still links to the original version, so search engines will recognize that PA is the duplicate).

The bad stuff:

- no more short posts version / list of post titles, at least for now. My stats show that very few people use the former, and if you really need something like either, you can just feed the RSS feed (!) into an aggregator and choose "titles only", or something like that
- I've just configured all of this, so there may be problems I haven't detected yet.

For some days now, the PA feed hasn't been updating itself, affecting email subscribers too. This is a technical problem; the software used for PA apparently doesn't scale too well with a large number of member blogs.

I've already looked into it a bit, and will continue to do so. If nothing can be done, I'll try to switch to some other software, or possibly even begin to hack my own. This will take some time, though.javascript:void(0)

For the moment, I apologize for the inconvenience. The "normal" version of PA (that is, browsing to planetatheism.com) still works.

Nullifidian has recently created a new aggregator, Planet Humanism. Looks great, and I wish it the greatest success.

If you're curious, no, I don't think of it as competition to Planet Atheism. :) There's certainly room for both. As I've already told Nullifidian, the only potential problem I see is that the members of each aggregator will probably want to join the other, and will probably be eligible, so there's a risk that they will have something like 90% of blogs in common. But I hope that can be avoided (maybe there's some humanists out there who don't really consider themselves atheists), and it's great to have one more aggregator to read. :)

So... atheist or not, if you have a humanism-themed blog, go join PH. :)

As some of you know, besides being an atheist and maintaining Planet Atheism, I'm also, among other things, a Unix/Linux systems administrator, and I'm also interested in subjects like search engine optimization, website creation and promotion, full-time blogging, and so on.

One thing I've noticed is that PA has a much, much worse Alexa rank than many other of my sites, even though they are less visited. Obviously, this will not do. :)

Therefore, as a favor (and this is just a favor to me, nothing more -- I won't be annoyed if you don't do it, and I have no way of knowing who does and doesn't), I'd like to ask you, if you read PA through the site (as opposed to the RSS feed), to please install this Firefox extension. Just click on the grey "download searchstatus" button, and follow the instructions. After you install it and restart your browser (as indicated), you will get a small box on your browser's statusbar with PageRank, Alexa and Compete indicators, and will be contributing to the latter two's ratings every time you access PA.

If you use Internet Explorer, I'd advise you to switch to Firefox, for your own sake, not mine, as it's a much better, more secure browser (and then install the above extension! :) ). Opera, Safari and Konqueror users can't help me on this one, unfortunately: they're great browsers, but the extension isn't available for them.

Again, this is simply a personal favor I'm asking. It requires virtually no work from you, and you will be helping promote PA by improving its statistics (and rank). But I'll understand if you don't want to do it, of course.

Thanks in advance. :)

Readers and members of Planet Atheism may be (I hope :) ) aware of the Planet Atheism FAQ. I believe it is quite comprehensive, and it should answer any questions a potential member may have.

But what about current members? Sometimes, they have questions, too. I could add them (and their answers) to the current FAQ, but I think that those who're interested in one of the kinds of answers aren't necessarily interested in the other, and vice-versa. If you're not in, you won't be having any problems, and if you're in, you're not considering whether joining is a good idea. :)

Therefore, later today (I hope) I will be starting a new Planet Atheism members FAQ. It will include answers for questions such as "my last post isn't showing up on PA".

If you're a member, and have any other questions, ask away (for instance, as a comment on this post), and I'll answer them, either as a reply, or in the FAQ. :)