If you’re reading this, that means Canadian Atheist is back online, and you’re seeing it in its new home.
You may have already noticed the little green padlock in your browser’s address bar. Yes, CA is now secure. In fact, CA is now only secure; no more insecure connections allowed. No one will be able sniff or modify stuff sent to and from CA anymore. This will not only help protect CA from future hack attempts, it will also protect readers.
There will be more new features rolled out in the coming weeks. But for now, I am going to focus on making sure CA is secure and stable and working for everybody. (Well, almost everybody. The truth is, with our new security requirements, some very old browsers will no longer work. But we’re talking browsers that are well over a decade old, and allowing their continued use puts everyone at risk.)
If you notice anything not working or behaving strangely, please send us a note either through the contact form, via email at webmaster@canadianatheist.com, or you can contact us through Twitter at @CanAtheist, the Canadian Atheist Facebook page, or the Canadian Atheist Google+ page. Or just leave a comment here.
Great to see CA moving forward. I strongly support CA being on its own server rather than hosted by a single solution company. This really opens up the possibilities.
It really does! I’m stoked about what we can accomplish.
Back in January I proposed three things I wanted to see accomplished in 2017: getting the blasphemy law repealed, setting up a place for Canadian SHAFT history, and getting translations of major SHAFT documents into more Canadian (particularly indigenous) languages.
Well, the blasphemy law repeal bill is 2⁄7 of the way through, which ain’t half bad considering it’s not just a repeal of the blasphemy law, but is actually a rather fat bill that repeals dozens of laws. But this is a straight-up government bill, not a private member’s bill, and it’s one that Wilson-Raybould has hitched her name to, so it’s almost certainly going to make it. I don’t know when the Justice Committee meets again (last time was Monday), or when they’ll get around to C-51 (they’re currently busy with C-46), so this one might not actually get fully repealed until 2018, but I’d still call it a win!
The SHAFT history idea I have in mind is to set up a wiki, probably MediaWiki. I’ve already set aside the space for that (at
https://history.canadianatheist.com/), and I already have a bunch of data to put in it. (I never got around to writing about Sterry, unfortunately.) I could start that tomorrow. But I would rather do it right than fast, and there were other suggestions that came up in the comments that I’d like to see if I could incorporate, so this might not get running before 2018. Or it might – depends on how much else is on my plate! So I won’t call this one a win, but I also won’t call it a miss yet!Finally, the translations idea. I have already got translations of a couple important documents into a few indigenous languages. All I need to do at this point is set up the actual site to display them. The space is already set aside at
https://rosetta.canadianatheist.com/. That will probably be up and running before 2018, at least in limited (non-interactive) form. I mean, I could put them up right now – they’d be up within a half-hour – but it would be spartan and ugly and difficult to maintain. In any case, I’d say that one is a win!So right now I’m batting at least 2⁄3, and depending on how much else comes up, I might pull of the hat trick!
(I’m actually way behind my planned schedule because I seriously underestimated how much work the hosting change was going to be. Not the actual change itself, but all the cleanup that was required before the change could even begin. But I was deliberately conservative in my plans, giving myself lots of room for everything, so I’m behind where I’d hoped to be but really not behind where I planned to be.)
One quick suggestion, and this is mostly personal preference, but I’d switch from justified text to left-aligned. This can be an issue on mobiles (never mind that the theme eventually needs to get replaced by something responsive) but when longer links get pasted in there, or a sentence involves a large number of long words, the spacing can go all funky. I think there are some studies that suggest left-align is more readable for these reasons as well.
I totally agree. I intend to roll out a new theme sometime early next year that will be better for mobile (possibly even AMP, but I’m not sure that’s more than just hype right now).
There are a number of annoyances I intend to fix, and the alignment was one of them – others include no hover highlighting for links, weird styling for definition lists, oddly squished together line heights, no paragraph spacing in blockquotes, and so on. I would like to make the new style a lot cleaner, too – right now there are sidebars on the left *and* right full of information that doesn’t need to be on every single page, all in a space less than a thousand pixels wide.
You can probably see this is something that’s been bugging me for a while. ^_^;