Humanist Library of Leeds

At the end of last year, and I do mean the end of last year (it was started over Christmas!) my charity embarked on a new project, to bring together a great collection of literature on humanism and the surrounding subjects.

The idea was to create a Humanist Library here in Leeds which could be a world class collection made available to researchers and in the long term the general public as well.

Similar collections already exist at places like Conway Hall and the Bishopsgate Institute, both of which have excellent collections, unfortunately these are relatively inaccessible to people based up north who don't have the time or money to travel to London on a regular basis.

While the project will no doubt take a long time to really build up a great collection, I'm happy to say that the initial building blocks for the project are in place and we have a good foundation to expand out from.

Humanist Chaplaincy Network

In recent years the demand for non-religious pastoral care has grown significantly. As more and more people lose their faith, the demand for occasionally needing "spiritual advice" or someone to talk to has continued as ever and as such as gap in the market has opened up if you will as non-believers search for the same service on their own world view.

As a consequence a number of chaplains have sprung up, most notably Greg Epstein at Harvard University who gained notoriety with his book Good Without God. Here in the UK, the universities in Glasgow are now supported by a humanist chaplain too, in the form of Mandy Evans Ewing.

To help this much welcome growth continue, CWF recently established the Humanist Chaplaincy Network to provide support, training, networking and resources for those volunteering and working as humanist chaplains.

It's Only Water

It's been a long time since anyone posted on this blog. Indeed, it's been well over a year. That really is a long time. It's not that there hasn't been things going on since then, things have, not to such an extent has they were before but never the less things are moving forward. Somehow this didn't filter down to the blog though.

In any case, I wanted to talk about the It's Only Water campaign as I believe it is a good cause. The aim of the campaign is to better educate the public on homeopathy and reduce public spending on it.

The best damn thing the web has ever seen

It's hard to believe that this blog has been going for two years now. That's quite a long time. My own personal blog has now been going for three years and while that isn't much time at all compared with the old school bloggers who started back in the day, it's interesting to read back through my earlier posts and think about how long ago it actually feels (I'm apparently getting old).

Never the less though, some things never change. Like how awesome Avril Lavigne is. While I'm not quite as big a fan of The Best Damn Thing (her new album) as Under My Skin, it still has some real kick ass songs on it, and if nothing else, it brought back a lot of memories.

With that in mind, the latest addition to the network is Avril Addicts. This new fan site contains loads of information including a database of all her releases (albums, singles, etc) with cover art, a song trivia section, a song meanings section, articles, some quality content rather than the 3 pages of photos and a Wikipedia ripped off biography (it has the photo galleries as well! Plus an original biography I wrote especially for the site too). So hopefully it will be a bit better quality than a lot of the sites out there.

Everyone loves Booty Luv

That of course isn't true. But it should be as Booty Luv are one of the best funky house outfits to come along in a while. So from now on you can keep on top of their latest activites and releases on our new site, Booty Luv Fans.

Haunting error messages

Slip ups can haunt major websites for a long time - especially with our new site launch in which users can upload screenshots of major websites when they are having problems and displaying error messages :P.

The site, named Server Problems Maybe? will feature the most amusing screenshots we can find. The first screenshot to be uploaded is one of Sony Music displaying some PHP error messages when it was unable to locate an include file.

A site for Miss Clarkson

While most of us are quite content to deny we actually like the product of American Idol, stick one of her songs are and at least half a dozen people in the room will eventually start singing along to it.

With that in mind we've launched I Heart Kelly Clarkson to show our appreciation.