Hey all,

There’s an idea I’ve been kicking around inside my head for a couple of weeks, and I’ve decided I’m going to try and get it all down here this week. Unlike my regular pattern of posting, this week will be far more chaotic in terms of frequency and post length. I’m hoping to get feedback from you, and hope that this will prompt some rigorous conversation.

As a heads-up to new readers, I will be marking my customary observation of Black History Month by taking on this book. While I recognize that there is much more to black history than the story of racism, my emphasis continues to be on placing contemporary race relations in a historical context, which requires an honest exploration of what race has meant in Canada up to this point. I am sure, incidentally, that there will be abundant references to Canada’s treatment of Aboriginal people and various Asian migrant populations, so it will require a bit of branching out.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on over the next few weeks.

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Bridget Gaudette, co-founder of Secular Woman and blogger at EmilyHasBooks has started a series called “Shades of Black Atheism” where she has invited black atheists to share their stories. This week, the subject of her series is lil’ ol’ me:

Twenty-eight years old and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Ian was raised as a Roman Catholic by a father who is a former priest from Guyana (a small South-American former British colony). His mother was an Irish/German Canadian convert to Roman Catholicism, but his family was what he described as “averagely religious,” attending church on a weekly basis. Ian went to Sunday school as well. The family celebrated the major religious holidays, but their “lives were not suffused with gods.” Perhaps it is for that reason that Ian’s being an atheist has not affected his relationship with his family. He stated, “I live very far away from them, which means that my day-to-day life is fairly off their radar, and vice versa. When we are together, we focus more on spending time with each other than on things that we disagree on.”

Go check out the rest, and be sure to read the rest of the series as it comes out. I’d imagine the best way to manage that is to follow her on Twitter or rig up one of them “RSSR” dealies you kids are using these days.

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A bit of a brag here: this blog just passed the million hits mark at FTB (technically, I got a million cumulative hits a few months back), and insofar as that makes this a “successful blog” or something, this advice may be helpful.

Freethought blogs has just gone through its third round of a formal screening and recruitment process, a process that I have had a role in designing and implementing. One of the common questions I see asked when we’ve announced that this blog or that blog has been invited to join us is a (usually friendly) inquiry into how blogs get chosen. This usually takes the form of “I sure would have liked to be selected. What do you have to do to get the attention of _________?” I have fielded a couple of times, and I know other people get this more often, questions from people who want to know how to make their blog successful or how to ‘get hits’ or whatever. What follows is a handful of opinions on blogging that I’ve developed over the past couple of years.

Before I start, I want to caution anyone looking to cite me as an expert that I am, in fact, no such thing. I have run two blogs in my life, only one of which went anywhere outside of my immediate circle of friends. The one that ‘made it’ (insofar as being on FTB is ‘making it’, which is arguable) is still not anything like a runaway success. Even within the small pool of FTBers, I am hardly the top when it comes to traffic or name recognition. However, having talked to other bloggers who are more well-trafficked and having listened to what they say, I don’t think my advice is too far outside the apparent consensus.

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