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New Look, New URL, Same Old Blog

Nate

Hey gang, I’ve decided to make a few changes that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I felt like they were big enough to comment on.

First of all, I’ve finally moved away from a WordPress URL and gone with http://findingtruth.info. I would have loved .com or .net, but apparently the title of my blog is pretty catchy. The old one (findingtruth.wordpress.com) will still work, but you’ll be redirected to the .info address.

Secondly, I’ve moved to a new theme. I really liked the old one, but this one caught my eye — feel free to let me know what you think about it.

Finally, based on a friend’s suggestion, I’ve decided to use a static homepage for the site, so new visitors can get an idea of who I am and what the blog is about before they’re dropped in front of my latest post. This means the blog articles will now reside at https://findingtruth.info/blog.

These are definitely the biggest changes I’ve made to the blog since I switched it from a Christian to an atheist perspective. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which change was more impactful. 🙂

Feel free to weigh in on these changes — I’m curious to see how they affect the user experience.

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Published by Nate

58 thoughts on “New Look, New URL, Same Old Blog”

  6. I like! I DEFINITELY need to update mine… It looks childish and terrible. I was hoping you could work your magic as a web developer and help with the design, but I guess I read my answer above.

    There’s a girl named aubrey kinch that does a lot of design for a decent price, maybe I’ll splurge one day.

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  8. I’m with Nate. I don’t like nested comments. It makes it too hard to keep track of which comments are the most recent. Also the deeper the nesting goes the more narrow the comments become
    and eventually
    they start
    to look
    like this.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Nate, I have an idea for a conversation starter. Not sure where to post it, so feel free to move it if you want.
    – – –

    I’m almost finished reading a book called Joker One and part way through the book the author (a former marine lieutenant who served in Iraq) starts to talk about God. He is recounting his time in Iraq and just described the first loss of life that occurred within his own platoon. He decides that it is better to believe in God and his logic goes something like this:

    If there is no God then there is no hope for his dead comrade. He is gone forever and has served and died for no ultimate purpose.

    If there is a God then there is hope that this man is still alive in Heaven and has sacrificed himself for the greater good serving a higher purpose.

    I think the point he makes brings up a good question: Would we be better off having hope in an afterlife from a pragmatic point of view? Would we be happier and less prone to become depressed if we at least clung to some *hope* that there is a better life waiting for us after we die? Would this hope do us any harm in the here and now or is it possible that holding on to this hope could make us a better person?

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  12. If we’re intelligent enough to know there’s no afterlife, then living the lie wouldn’t solve anything.

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  13. IMHO , belief in an afterlife tends to keep people from living this life 110% . If they don’t achieve much here, they will have eternity to make up for it.

    That why I posted this saying on my blogsite title.

    “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming…Wow! What a ride!”

    Liked by 1 person

  14. Thanks, Susane! I actually like your blog’s theme. Background images don’t always work well, but I think it does in your case. Been following your recent series, btw. I’m happy for you! 🙂 Hope things continue to go well.

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  17. Dave, I see no harm in people believing in a god or in an afterlife, necessarily. If it helps people cope with the loss of loved ones as well as deal with their own mortality, or even if it helps give them a bit of courage in dangerous or desperate situation, then I would not fault them.

    It would be nice. I once held those same views. In some ways I envy them, but in others, I do not as I prefer the truth whether I like it or not, and since I think Christianity is not the truth, and that the truth is also that no god has been revealed (and certainly no real promise of an afterlife) then I’d prefer to personally be done with that view.

    But can it be good? I think so, but we have also seen where it can also be bad. I know, that whether I like something or not, or regardless of how much or how little something gives me comfort, that those things in no way validate a belief or speak to reality.

    Soldiers and Marines believing their close comrades are being taken care of in an afterlife, or grieving parents believing that they’ll see their deceased children again at some point… I could not criticize people like this. I feel badly for them and often wish I could get lost in their fantasy. I wish it were so, I am just very doubtful that it is any more than wishful thinking, as sad as that may be.

    For good or bad, people die. There’s nothing we can do about that.

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  23. Yes Arch, whenever I hear of Atwell, a term like crackpot or the like is usually also applied, and I am referring to atheist commentators here.

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  24. Hi Nate,

    FWIW (but you did ask for comments) I’ll give you 4 thumbs up out of 5.

    1. I think having your own URL has all sorts of benefits, one of which is that I think Google takes you more seriously.

    2. I think a static home page is good. regular readers subscribe, and don’t see either static home page or the old blog home page, so it doesn’t matter for them. But new people are probably better served by a static home page.

    3. I like the use of the info subdomain – I use it myself – though that depends a little on whether you see your blog as providing factual, researched info, or more opinion and personal ideas.

    4. I agree about nested comments. They sound like a good idea, but generally end up difficult to read and difficult (for me) to follow.

    5. My only personal preference different to yours is the picture at the top. I think they look good the first time someone comes to the blog, but after that they get in the way a little – you sometimes even have to scroll down to see the post title. I prefer a new picture for each post (if the theme uses featured image, that can be useful in other ways too).

    Since you are a web developer, may I ask you a question please. My self hosted website has a HTML home page in the root, 100+ HTML pages in folders and the blog in a /blog folder. But now I want to move all the pages into the blog as WP pages. Trouble is, they will then have the URL sitename/blog/category/pagename and so won’t be continuous with the present URLs.

    There is a complicated way to shift my present blog to the root directory, but I am scared I would stuff it up and lose connection to my database (I have had that happen in some trials on a dummy site). Do you know any way in the PHP code to strip out the folder the blog is located in (/blog in this case) and then put the /blog back into the blog posts only using permalinks?

    I have asked on forums and not got good answers. Please don’t worry too much about this, but if you know it can be done, a brief pointer would help. Thanks.

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  25. Re Joseph Atwill, obviously I have my bias (like everyone else, though opposite to most people here), but a quick search shows the negative comments above are justified.

    One of the embarrassments of being a christian is the “interesting individuals” (I am trying not to use a more pejorative term) who regularly appear to predict the end of the world. Obviously none so far has been right, but there will be another one any day I suppose, and the “proof” will be different again to all the others who were wrong.

    I think one of the embarrassments of being an atheist would be the regular appearance of people able to prove some alternative beginning to christianity which makes Jesus the person a myth. You can have a fair idea that they are all “interesting individuals” because every one has a different story, generally a different conspiracy. Virtually every new story is by a person with no real qualifications to make any such statements. And most of them have a book to sell.

    Atwill conforms to this. He has no qualifications to speak of, and apart from the bio he wrote himself, the only bio I found was (appropriately?) on IMDb. And not only his fellow atheists (Bart Ehrman, JT Eberhard, PZ Myers and others) are embarrassed by his unfounded claims, but so are mythicists and ex-Mythicists like Tom Verenna, Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald.

    You can Google more references if you really want to! 🙂

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