What's New?
Posted a new Featured Essay: Free Will Explained, on the Essays page.
Posted a new Featured Essay: Morality is Relative Because of its Many Sources, on the Essays page.
Posted a new Featured Essay: Christianity Does NOT Exist, on the Essays page.
Added chat room from chat aggregator, Meebo. Login with your existing AIM, Yahoo, or other popular chat account or simply use the guest account. If you use the guest account, you can replace the guest ID with your own ID, if you want. Chat is available on all AtheistExile pages, including the Member Forum, in the left column, under the menu.
Removed the Facebook badge -- it doesn't allow custom sizing and none of the sizes offered fit the left column properly.
Added 6 hours of video by Jonathan Miller on the Videos page. Includes: "A Brief History of Disbelief" and "The Atheism Tapes". Requires installing the Veoh video downloader and viewer.
Posted a new Featured Essay: Morality, Religion and Terrorism, on the Essays page.
Posted new essay: Muslim Conflicts, on the Essays page.
Posted statistics: Muslim Majorities, on the Essays page.
Added a new Featured Essay: Creation and the Conservation of Energy, on the Essays page.
Updated the Pat Condell video collection on the Videos page. I'm up to date with all 58 of Pat's videos. Listed in reverse chronological order (latest first).
Added a new subforum, AtheistExile Member Links, to the AtheistExile Member Forum.
Added a new subforum, AtheistExile Member Images, to the AtheistExile Member Forum.
New Featured Essay: "Freedom of Speech is an Attack on Islam?", in Essays.
"Draft Constitution by Hizb ut-Tahrir" in Novelties. Hizb ut-Tahrir is allegedly a nonviolent Islamic organization, banned in several countries but not in the U.S. This is their idea of what the constitution of an Islamic state should be.
I've added the Enlarge Display button functionality to the AtheistExile banner. If you hover over the banner, you'll see a message informing you that you can click the banner to get rid of it -- and gain more viewing area.
I've finished migrating the Qur'an discussion (including all comments) from the old (defunct) forum over to the new Member Forum.
It appears that Nabble has made some sort of improvement to the forum registration process. New members now seem able to register, though the process appears to be a bit confusing to some. Registering is for Nabble's sake. Once registered, new members will be prompted with an approval form to enable them to create or reply to threads. This is because Nabble defers approvals to site administrators. The approvals are emailed to me, so if I'm not immediately available to approve incoming requests, they might take up to a day to be approved.
I made the switch from CSS to frames. My pages load as quickly as I know how to make them. However, some visitors might find that the main display area is not large (tall) enough to view videos. To remedy this, I've included an "Enlarge Display" button (on the left, under the logo). Click the button and the banner image and motto line will disappear, allowing you to view text and images using the entire display area (right side of screen). Once switched to the enlarged display area, you can switch back to the default display (with banner and motto) by clicking the same button (relabeled with "Restore Banner").
I'm evaluating the feasibility of using framesets instead of CSS for my web pages. As it stands now, the left sidebar (which is largely graphical with roll-overs and contains the Twitter applet) has to refresh every time a page is loaded. Additionally, the top banner, tag-line and "What's new?" button (all of which are roll-overs) also need to be refreshed every time a page is loaded. I've minimized the delays by preloading (caching) all these elements (except Twitter) -- they load locally (quickly) when a page is refreshed or loaded (i.e. they don't need to be redownloaded from the AtheistExile site).
However, by using framesets, I can make sure that all the components mentioned above (including Twitter) gets loaded only once and stay in place while you browse any and all the pages you want. In other words, as you browse pages, only the content (in the main body of the page) gets downloaded while the rest of the page remains static. I know I've just revamped the website but I might do it again for the additional benefits of framesets. I'm pretty new at this, so I'm learning the hard way. :-)
Fixed a few performance-related problems. Optimized graphics files, reducing their size about 80% and decreasing screen-update times accordingly. Also preloaded all "roll-over" graphics for fast, smooth, performance. Twitter and Nabble applets take longer to load than other parts of their respective pages, so I made sure they are at the bottom of pages (so that the initial screen loads quickly while the applets load below the initial screen).
Yeah!!! Just finished AtheistExile.com's NEW makeover, with more content and features.
Moved Twitter to the sidebar.
Featured Essay: Atheism, Free Will and Scientific Paradigms, in Member Essays.
Posted new topic to R&S sub-forum of AtheistExile's Member Forum: "Islam and inverted intolerance: Sarkozy and anti-burqa campaign". By the way, check out the News page, it's rich in subject matter for forum discussions.
Removed the Twitter script (Who gives a twit?) from the Home page and moved it to the News page.
I just posted my first 2 topics in the Member Forum. One is a chronological listing of suwar in the Qur'an (to aid in following the discussion of the Qur'an) and the other, "The Crux of the Matter: No Basis for Supernatural Belief", is posted in the Religion and Spirituality (R&S) sub-forum.
Added a register button to the Member Forum. The only way Nabble provides for registering is via the Options menu item -- which is not intuitive enough! I didn't want to frustrate new members, so I put a big register button near the top of the page.
Finally added a New Member Forum! I'll be migrating the "Open Minded Discussion of Qur'an" off the blog and into the new forum. As of this writing, the forum is up and running but no entries have been submitted yet. I'll be posting entries soon. Please sign up: everyone is welcome.
Added a slide show of religious images (and miscellaneous ones), in Novelties.
Added Twitter module near the top of the Home page.
Open minded discussion of the Qur'an. Just select the "Open minded discussion of the Qur'an" category filter (from the panel on the right) to join in the discussion.
Church signs, in Novelties.
Lists of Atheists by career fields, in Novelties.
Christian and Muslim Apologetics, in Apologetics.
New Ayaan Hirsi Ali videos and Zeitgeist's religion section, in Videos.
Improved feedback forms in Contact Us and Member Essays