You can contribute at the top of the page via one of two ways. By popular demand, you can now make a one-time donation OR a recurring monthly donation (i.e., enter how much you want to give each month and you will automatically be charged for that amount each month).
Now, down to business. I've decided that, like many of the other blogs, I'll institute a one-week-a-month fundraising-a-thon. The rest of the time I'll leave you alone, but during that week, I get to beg for contributions.
Why should you contribute?
1. Consider the blog a newspaper or magazine. You'd pay for those without missing a beat, why not do the same for your favorite blogs?Why do we need contributions?
2. Consider the blog an advocacy organization, like your favorite gay rights group, civil rights org, liberal non-profit, etc. We do the same activism they do, some might argue we do it a lot better, and they get millions to the campaigns we do for free.
3. More generally, if you like what we do, help us do it. I do a lot more than just write on the blog. I do advocacy on a variety of issues, help out on local campaigns when I can (like in Maine this past weekend), do TV punditry on progressive causes, etc. If you like the work I do across the board, help me do more of it (please).
1. This is now my full-time job, which means my salary comes pretty much exclusively from this blog rather than the consulting business I've mostly given up in order to do AMERICAblog.Ok, enough of that. As always, the blog will remain free, so you don't have to give anything. And, as I've noted before, please do NOT give if you're struggling to make ends meet. That's very kind, but seriously, save your money until you can truly afford to give.
2. We are about to move and upgrade the blog to a new server, and that is going to cost us thirty to forty thousand dollars over the next year. (And those of you who think it won't cost that, you don't know the details of how much traffic we're getting. We used up 500 gigs of bandwidth just for those war-for-porn photos a few weeks ago. I have a proposal put together by an expert I know and trust, we've already gotten bids from vendors, this is what it's going to cost.)
Some more background on why we're upgrading the blog:
As I mentioned the other day, we hit our server limit with Blogger - the blog has simply gotten too big for the space they offer. It's not Blogger's fault, they're just not built for really big blogs. What that means is that I've had to delete old files on the server - meaning, pretty much every upload (orchids photos, sound files, documents, etc.) that I've posted to the blog between its launch and June of this year has been deleted to make room for "new" posts to the blog. I estimate in a few weeks to a month or so we'll have hit our Blogger server limit for good (all the old uploads will be deleted), and that will mean we'll have to delete our archives in order to keep the blog running. I don't plan on letting that happen.
We have a detailed plan for moving the blog to a dedicated server and redoing the entire blog itself with LOTS of new features. But that will cost good money - we'll be paying around $1500/month in Internet bandwidth alone (on Blogger, bandwidth is free). But if we don't want the blog to grind to a halt in short order, we have no choice but to move ahead and assume the cost. I'm talking to some big donors about helping the blog out overall, but no cash is yet forthcoming.
As an aside, I know some of you have offered "free" deals to help us out. I appreciate that, but this blog is now a serious entity and we need to treat it as such. I'd rather avoid patching together free things here and there at the expense of making a product that works and can be scaled up to something even bigger and better as we grow - that was the problem we've had with Blogger, going with "the free" rather than "the best." We need to move AMERICAblog over to the best tech solution we can get, and that will take serious money.
Ok, that's it for now. Thanks as always, JOHN
PS Show a little love to your other favorite blogs too :-)
