Canadian Atheist 2016

by | December 31, 2015

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Today’s Google Doodle shows

five colourful birds sitting on a branch. The birds are waiting for an egg wearing a 2016 sash to hatch and mark the beginning of the year 2016.

Canadian Atheist would like to mark the beginning of 2016 by giving its readers the opportunity to give their input on what they would like the website to produce in 2016:

  • What do you think should be Canadian Atheist’s priorities for the next year?
  • What kind of posts and what topics would you like to see on the website?

Please leave your suggestions in the comment section of this post, or better yet, volunteer to become a Canadian Atheist writer, so the issues you think deserve attention are featured on Canadian Atheist.

11 thoughts on “Canadian Atheist 2016

    1. Indi

      That would be a neat series, actually. Especially if we do rebuttals to some of the more complex apologetics that are not easy to just hand-wave away.

      Reply
  1. Veronica Abbass Post author

    Tracy

    Thank you for your suggestion.

    Indi

    Yes, that would be a neat series; thank you for volunteering to take it on.

    Reply
    1. Indi

      ^_^;

      Well I don’t mind, I guess. In fact, I’d like to encourage everyone to send in suggestions. The easiest way to contact me directly is via IRC, on the Rizon IRC network, in the channel #indi – my computer’s always connected, even if I’m not there, so leave a message and I’ll see it. Otherwise, you can just use the “Contact” link at the top of the page (if it says “to Indi” or anything like that anywhere in the subject or message, it’ll get forwarded to me eventually I’m sure).

      In fact, like Veronica, I encourage anyone who has a topic they want to see covered by *any* of the writers here to use the “Contact” link, and let us know!

      Reply
  2. dusttodust

    Well…shoot. So someone comes up with a suggestion and they get a finger pointed at them to do it. Albeit in this case the prolific Indi but still…:) Might the finger point deter someone from piping up with a suggestion?

    Reply
    1. Indi

      I think the reason I got fingered was specifically because I’m *not* as prolific as I could be. ^_^;

      2015 was a rough year for me, I don’t think I even managed a single post a month on *any* of the blogs I write for. (I just checked, and I did actually manage 1.5 posts a month on CA, but didn’t make the cut anywhere else. I only did 4 posts for the whole year on Explicit C++!)

      I’ve already taken steps to do better. The last month or so I’ve been making preparations to be *much* more prolific this year. Actually having a regular series to write for is a good thing.

      Reply
  3. Randy

    I guess mostly just keep being Canadian. And atheist.

    I know the legal and political and social issues will always be there, but I do miss what initially drew me to online atheism which is science and philosophy. If we didn’t have to think about religion or our relationship to it, what would we think about? There’s a lot out there.

    Reply
    1. Joe

      I’ve been seriously slacking lately… More science and philosophy sounds like a good idea. Hmmm. Let’s see…

      Reply
  4. Indi

    If I had to make a CA wishlist, it might look like this:

    SSL. That would make it possible to access CA as “https://canadianatheist.com” (note the “s” in “https”, “s” for “secure”). With regular HTTP, data can be intercepted in transit – that’s how passwords get stolen: you send your login password to CA, someone catches the packet and voilà, they have your password. (There are more technical tricks, too, like intercepting session tokens so they’re “logged in as you” without actually needing your password.) With HTTP+SSL (aka https), data is encrypted in transit – even if someone catches a packet in flight, they can’t get anything from it except where it came from and where it’s going… useless info for hacking, really. In the past, SSL was expensive. But this year there is going to be a HUGE push to encrypt the entire Internet. Part of that push is the “Let’s Encrypt” project, which is giving away unlimited free SSL certificates. So CA can become secured for free (contingent on CA’s hosting provider incorporating Let’s Encrypt, which they damn well should).
    Forums. CA is and should remain primarily a blog, but some things are just too complicated to discuss in blog comments. Forums also create greater possibilities for collaborative discussion – sharing information and working together to build bigger projects. Even better would be single-sign-on integration with the blog, so you sign on to the blog and forums with the same login data. (Even better still would be OpenID sign on for both.)
    A calendar (or several calendars) – either a Google Calendar or just a basic iCalendar (possibly using the h-event microformat) – that people can subscribe to. There could be a calendar for Canadian secular/humanist/atheist/freethought (SHAFT) “holidays”, like Freethought Day (12 Oct). There could also be one for Canadian SHAFT events, like INR6 in May – it would be great if we could get Canadian SHAFT organizations to send us info about their events on a regular basis. And perhaps “today in Canadian SHAFT history”.
    A series on *CANADIAN* figures in SHAFT, both contemporary and historical. For example, who here knows who Eugene Sterry is? (His is a great story, too!) Unfortunately, this series would be a little bit out of my league – history is not exactly something I’m hip on – though I could certainly take a stab at it.
    A series giving updates of new book/film/whatever releases by Canadian SHAFT authors/filmmakers. Ideally we could just get a list of publishers that publish that stuff and get on their mailing lists. In exchange for them informing of about new releases, we could promote them and maybe even review them.

    A lot of these ideas are just wild “spit-balling”; I don’t really expect them to be practical. But maybe they’ll inspire somebody.

    Reply
  5. billybob

    Indi

    I will look into the secure HTTP. Site is now more secure as
    we have purchased real time security, that said I agree more is better.

    Lets Encrypt is still in beta but I will check it out.

    I will look into forums and calendars. Calendar probably
    easier than a forum.

    Also I downloaded the entire corrupted site during the last outage before reinstalling WordPress. Most files such as the images and posts are there and can be transferred by ftp at
    minor risk, just takes a long time as you have to transfer each month individually so I only did part of them. Real busy until Jan. 20th but when I get some time I will look into it. Backup first then try!

    Reply

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