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Blog

I'm blogging from the train heading down to London for the national press launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, or the AHS as it is better known.

Tomorrow will be an exciting day with Polly Toynbee, A.C. Grailing and Richard Dawkins speaking alongside out very own el presidente Norman.

No doubt there will be much reporting going on from the members down here as well as planty of photos on the website after the event!

Interestingly we're taking a total of ten members down from Leeds. This is unmatched by any other society other than Royal Holloway which is a London based university so it's not really a challenge for them. As such I think we can give ourselves a good pat on the back for effort.

Keep your eyes pealed on the site for further updates.

Exams are over! I know I am relieved to go back to my normal timetable of lectures and at least four A-Soc events a week to keep me occupied.

Well, with the launch of our new course, Perspective, starting on Friday our wish has come true.

We kick off by inviting Ba'hai Society to come and tell us a bit about themselves and what they believe in. We will be hosting them in Meeting Room 5 in the ARC at 7pm this Friday. As usual food and drink will be provided.

We will be introducing a different society each week, including the Christian Union, Islam, Paganism and more besides.

In keeping with this Semester's focus on education, I will be giving a talk on the Life and Times of Mohammed this Tuesday in Meeting Room 3 at 7pm.

Hope to see you there!

We try out best to let people know is going on in the society. But despite our efforts sometimes vocally, at every meeting, via email, via text message, via Facebook, via the website and via RSS feed just aren't enough. Where then will people find out what is happening?

Luckily, having recently made the move onto Twitter I have also now set up an account for the society that all of the committee can tweet at so now you can follow us here.

Tonight say the first A-Soc event of 2009 take place in the Old Bar. We officially kicked off the new year with a social,a chance for those back in Leeds (and those that never left :P ) to take a break from work and chill out with soem good company. the decent sized turn out shows that there are many of you no doubt working hard for the upcoming exams.

To help ease you back into the A-Soc calendar we have a couple of relatively light events during the exam period. We start with Sinnimation - a collection of cartoons specially chosen by your committee that have a slight connection to religion, but are just plain funny! Expect The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, God, The Devil and Bob and many more! The second week back is a little more serious with us showing the moving docu-film "Baby Bible Bashers", a look at young Christian evangelists and their 'work'.

Well, that's it. Christmas is over and we can get back to normality and a more sensible approach to all things festive.

I recommend everyone catch up on this year's address to the nation from Her Majesty. It will get you in the mood for some real debate and argument at A-Soc in the new year.

Hope you are all enjoying your time off and that you are ready for the new semester which is only 11 days away!

First off, I would like to thank everyone for their continued support of A-Soc and I am sure you will all agree that this semester has been one of the busiest we have ever had! Some of my personal highlights have included Make Your Own God, Debating the Theists, The AHS Conference, Interfaith Panel and our trip to London.

Not to worry though, we haven't exhausted all our good ideas and semester 2 will be just as jam packed as ever with exciting things to do and see. Things to watch out for include our new course Perspective, our inaugural formal debate with the Islamic Society and of course the much anticipated Rationalist Week 2009.

As always we rely on your support to make these events happen, so I hope we will see all of you again in the New Year and if you have enjoyed what you have seen then why not tell your friends and bring them to meetings too!

We will continue to run our weekly socials over the holiday period, so those of you still in Leeds are more than welcome to join us for a few festive beverages.

Good luck for those with exams in January.

Merry Winter Solstice (or Chrismukkawaleid)!

Yesterday we completed our second live webcast successfully! So never fear if you are unable to make it down to campus one week because you will be able to watch it live online.

This isn't going to be for all our events but hopefully a lot of our talks and debates will be broadcast live. You can see a schedule of what events will be broadcast on the webcasts page though this is by no means complete.

As it stands I would still like to get the audio quality a lot better but so far, so good really. All you need to have to be able to watch the webcast is Flash player which most people already have and it seems a fairly robost solution.

Well, Leeds pulled it off!

Leeds Atheist Society has just hosted the second conference of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS for short :P ).

The event was a great success. The constitution was ratified and its directions put into place. Two of our members were elected on to the Executive of the AHS. Tom Leadbeater, our recently elected AHS Rep for A-Soc was chosen as the organisation's Treasurer, a prestigious job. I was elected President of the AHS, which means that hopefully A-Soc's aims and objectives should get a good hearing at a national level.

Congratulations to Chris, our Events Sec who was appointed as a trustee for the AHS, a position that I am sure will be walk in the park for him.

Thanks to those A-Soc members that came down to support your representatives and ensure that we were shown off in the best possible light.

Watch this space for more information and upcoming events!

The observant of you may have noticed that the website is looking a little different today. Not massively but sufficently, it's like a fresh lick of paint really though there are a few more changes when you scratch the surface. As such, I'm going to discuss the thinking about the makeover and go through what has been changed.

The website has gone through some quite major changes since it was first launched in 2006. It began life in the summer of that year when the society was just starting and months before it was finally ratified by the union. To date however these have all been to the content of the site, we've added a lot, created the members area and made it far more interactive. The design has remained constant though while in the outside world, technology moved on.

The first change then is that the site is now quite a bit wider when it used to be. The original site was designed to fit in an 800x600 screen because that was fairly common back then and people may be starting to look at it on portable devices. These days people have much bigger monitors and we don't need to worry about people using phones or handhelds because the site has an alternative version for them (just open it in your phone and you'll see the site looks different) so the site is now designed to fit in a 1024x768 screen.

It is a bit more graphics heavy now as well. Almost everyone is on broadband these days so we can make the site look a little prettier without affecting load times too much. After all, when it comes down to it, we're all about style in A-Soc ;).

Next, the site navigation has been played around with. The tab system at the top is the same but we the links themselves have changed. Each page in the site is now sectioned into one of these days and when you go into that section a submenu appears down the right. This is because as the site content expanded we needed a better way to navigate round without having just a list of pages down the right hand side as we used to have.

The final big change is that our upcoming events are now listed down the right hand side. We wanted to make it easier to find the information you were looking for when you arrived on the site and finding out what events we have on has to be high on that list so you can now see all the events we are running for the next seven days in the menu box.

There are a few other changes too. For example, with the events archive you can now browse by academic year rather than just a big long list of all previous events. The photo galleries are also paged too both in the list of albums and when there are lots of photos in one album.

All this should hopefully make the site easier to use and navigate and make it easier and faster to find the information you want. I'll love to hear your feedback on the site so if you have any thoughts then please drop me an email and let me know what you think.

I'd just like to say congratulations to Tom for his election as the society's AHS representative at last night's election!

Tom will now be going on to take his place alongside Norman making up the two representatives from Leeds which will sit on the committee of the national organisation.

As Norm has already mentioned, the conference is taking place this weekend and full details can be found on Secular Portal.

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