The evolution of nullifidian.net

Since I’ve been tagged by the ever vigilant TW over at Why Don’t You Blog? with the “evolution meme” (I’m sure Dawkins wouldn’t agree with the use of either word ;-D) I thought I’d give it a go an explain how nullifidian.net has progressed since I started it.

While I’ve been a blogger since 2001, I didn’t start blogging properly nor consistently about religion, theocracy and other stupidity until mid-2006, when this blog originally started out as In Defence of Reality, hosted over at blogger.com after I became severely hacked off at Ruth Kelly’s catholic (in both senses of the word) ineptitude.

Since I was just starting to get my atheist/sceptical/humanist/secular blogging “freak” on (as I believe the kids call it these days) those initial posts were quite angry, random and not at all well thought out: I’m quite embarrassed to go back and read them now, but I keep them there for both posterity, and because I think it would be kind of dishonest to remove them. It’s one thing to blog about personal things (which I was used to) but quite another to address something more generic, and certainly something as emotive as politics, religion and other kinds of magical thinking.

IDoR was picked up on Atheist Blogs Aggregated (similar to Planet Atheism) for a while, but I had to stop blogging for a little bit for health reasons, and I dropped off the map for a couple of months.

I’m not sure what prompted me to register nullifidian.net, except perhaps a random search through domain registrations and having a spare domain credit idling in a hosting account. But register it I did, installed WordPress and that, as they say, was that. I restarted blogging on those silly religious and other magic ideas with earnest

Initially, the blog had the bog-standard WordPress theme, and I messed around with a few supplied with the default installation, but wasn’t too happy with any of them. But I picked one, and stayed with it for a bit.

The first proper post was a simple news link post about a muslim teaching assistant that had been sacked for refusing to remove her veil when teaching.

I really hate it when I do that; I see an interesting news article, think about sharing it with those who might not have seen it, but make absolutely no effort to add my own commentary as to why I’ve mention it at all: surely the principal purpose behind blogging? I still do it on occasion, although I try not to.

The first proper proper nullifidian.net post was, thankfully, sourced from the ever vitriolic stupid paranoid entertaining The Daily Mail which was a wee rant about bad journalism, conflating race and religion (one of my personal bugbears) and general stupidity. If it didn’t have a muslim angle, I probably wouldn’t have blogged about it, although my opinion of said journalism would have pretty much, I expect, remained. But, it was, and so I did.

In January 2007 I settled on the current theme, a modified version of the “Day Dream” theme by Jim Whimpey. I don’t know why, but I prefer the single column layout more than those with sidebars and random links and graphics all over the shop. I think it’s some kind of appeasement of my Asperger’s.

It was also about this time that I joined the ranks of Mojoey’s most excellent atheist blogroll which, at the time of writing, now contains links to something like 400-odd atheist blogs from around the world. Please check it out if you haven’t already.

I think it must have also have been about this time that I joined the Planet Atheism aggregator, which is always one of those web sites that I visit when booting up the browser every morning. Seriously, there’s so much good stuff there that I find it hard sometimes to even come up with anything original at all.

For the next few months, I posted about whatever I felt like, using news sources, other blogs, random quotes, and creating graphs and photoshopped images that satisfied my urge to be creative, despite my lack of talents in this area.

In March, I started the nullifidian tumblelog (hosted by Tumblr). The tumblelog is for short posts: a quote, a link, a video or picture, or something else that I like but doesn’t really require a full on blog post. I’ve been meaning to use it more, and I’ll keep my eye out for things to post there.

One highlight was in April when I was asked to review a book, Matthew Alper’s The God Part of the Brain. This was an interesting read, and I am still hoping that other publishers might be willing to ask me to honestly review a book. I like books, especially if they come without a price tag. :-)

In June I received my first bona fide theist’s rant as a email, which led me, in a fit of pique (and not some amusement and facetiousness) to come up with the TRINITY (Theistic Rant INdicator of Insanity and TrivialitY) scale for scoring such thing. To be honest, I’m awaiting further inept rantings to reuse this, but so far nada. Oh well, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I have another opportunity to do so.

The beginning of July gave me my first opportunity to host a blog carnival, which just happened to be for the Humanist Symposium. To be honest, I really didn’t know how to approach it, even after reading who knows how many other hosted carnivals. But I gave it a shot, and it seems to have paid off. The compliments that I received still give me a warm inner glow to this day. :-)

July also saw, after considering the success of Pedro’s Planet Atheism and my recent hosting of Humanist Symposium #4, a germ of an idea planted itself in my noggin: I thought it might be a good idea to see if the same might work for humanism, and thus set up Planet Humanism. Certainly, there’s an acknowledged crossover between planets atheism and humanism, but by no means is this either exclusive or complete, and I like to think that PH complements PA. In fact, I always visit PA first, and mop up my blog reading with PH afterwards. If you know of a humanist blog, feel free to send them to Planet Humanism, and encourage them to join in.

July was indeed busy, as it was in the middle of the month that I posted a rather long post concerning my own personal experiences of growing up around religion, and how I dealt with living in a fucked-up world that gave (gives?) as much (more?) respect to the claimed-yet-unproven as it did (does?) to the known-and-actual. This post took quite a while to write, as I had to go back through my memory and journals (or diaries, as we called them them) to dredge up some of the details.

Sadly, I didn’t realise that this would be somewhat of a temporarily-terminal magnum opus because in late July I had a number of unexpected personal “things” that came up, which necessitated me taking time away from blogging here for a little while. This was a shame, because I was starting to build up a worthwhile and very much convivial rapport with a few of the other UK atheist bloggers (and a few others from elsewhere around the world) that I was made aware of primarily through Planet Atheism (hi guys and gals!). I hope to catch up with them and re-establish this relationship when I’ve got my nullifidian mojo back to full strength.

I’m not sure if the tone of the blog has changed over the past year or so: I don’t think so, as I can see myself in posts that I don’t now remember writing, although I can see changes of where I’ve been more inspired to write more cerebral commentary, and others where I’ve been content to let reported content speak for itself. Or take the piss, where appropriate.

Statistically speaking, by far the most popular post is “If black is a color, then Atheism is a religion”, primarily because somebody submitted it to StumbleUpon, and it’s still getting hit to this day.

Other popular posts are The Atheist’s Bible, Summer 2007 edition! (and it’s progenitor The Atheist’s Bible – A confession – a slightly delayed April Fool’s joke); and a little Flash animation I did and posted under Supernatural science.

As well as StumbleUpon, a couple of posts have featured on Digg, although nothing that gave the server a hammering.

The most commented posts are In reply to Makarios which was a continued conversation with a theist after my comments replying to “Makarios” on Michael’s Atheist Perspective blog became rather long-winded; The Atheist’s Bible, Summer 2007 edition! which included a couple of people asking if they could print it out and distribute it :) and The Telegraph: Floods are judgment on society – CofE Bishops (yeah, I know about the typo!) wherein I take to task those CofE eejits who are starting to sound like their idiotic literalist transatlantic cousins.

Thankfully, I’ve never had reason enough to ban anyone from commenting. This comes down to my preference for free speech (of which I’m a very firm supporter) although I did come close once with one particular new age weirdo (that stank of the pseudo-scientific bollocks posited by the cretins behind What the Bleep Do We Know?).

Over the life of the blog, I’ve installed a number of WordPress plug-ins to help out with things here and there, and a few of the most useful have been 404 notifier (for when I’ve broken something, so that I write a RewriteRule to fix it); Reinvigorate which handles my blog stats; Ultimate Tag Warrior because I dislike WordPress’s category system and folksonomy seems far more useful; WP-Footnotes for cleanly managing footnotes; and the ever handy Akismet for taking care of the bane that is blog spam.

And, in closing, there are a couple things that I don’t do on this blog, and you may have noticed if you read with any regularity:

1) I don’t capitalise those things that I don’t think deserving of proper noun status, including the names of religions, religious titles and the generically vague notions of a “god”. To me this affords these things far more weight and a kind of respect that I refuse to give them.

2) I don’t talk about my personal life except where it interfaces with any of the topics above, and I don’t put down personal details. This is a personal preference, not through any kind of fear of reprisals from some outraged wingnut who has decided that their god thinks I should have my personal life violated, but just because this isn’t the forum for it. I have other journals that my real-life friends and family have access to, and that contains my personal bits and bobs—I keep that sort of thing there.

It was an interesting exercise to see how I’ve steered this blog over the past year and a bit. Thanks for reading!

This, as did the Eight Things meme, has gone through the blogosphere like high fibre bran. I’ll refrain from tagging anyone else, but consider yourself tagged by me if you are desirous of being inflicted with this and haven’t been already.

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