Donation drive

I have no idea if this is going to work. I’ve never tried it before. But if I never try I’ll never know, so here it goes. And I’ll give you fair warning: there’s a blackmail aspect to all of this.

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I’m seeking to raise € 2,500 in donations. Before the end of this year.

Update: the donation drive succeeded before the end of the afternoon. Still, I’d love to receive more donations. They will be used to improve this site. Thanks.

Let me explain. Currently I’m going through one of those phases where I have so little time and energy that I slash my not-for-profit work. That work includes the desktop compatibility tables, which haven’t been updated in about a year and are in need of some amendation, as well as the testing of a new crop of browsers.

The problem is that I don’t really care about the desktop browsers any more. Sure, they have their differences, and sure, web developers run into them, but it’s all so marginal and trivial compared to the mobile browsers that I just can’t be bothered.

The real value of the desktop tables is, I think, in the notes about the old IE versions, which aren’t going to change. So the most important information is already there.

Besides, the adoption of a fucking insane release cycle policy first by Chrome and now by Firefox is complicating matters considerably, since I cannot test in older versions and cannot even be sure that the version I end the test series in is the same as the one I started them in. (Unless I run all tests in one week, but that’s not going to happen as long as it’s volunteer work.)

Finally, if I do run all the tests the remarkable conclusion will be that all browsers support everything nowadays. Even IE? Yes, even IE. Yawn. (There’s always the chance that someone will get a detail wrong, though. But that chance is too slight to risk a week of unpaid work for.)

So why bother? The only reason I can think of is money; especially since most other attempts to “monetize” this site have failed miserably. (Except for ads. I never tried those. I don’t want to try them, either. Don’t tempt me.)

Updating the existing desktop tables takes me about a week. My official weekly rate is € 5,000, but since this all started as a labour of love I’m going to give the combined Interwebz a 50% discount. Which is how we arrive at the € 2,500.

So that’s it, really. I will update the desktop tables as soon as I’ve collected € 2,500. If that doesn’t happen before the end of the year I will conclude that the web development community is not interested in updates any more. (Don’t worry, the current tables will remain where they are.)

Oh, and some small print: I will run the updates in mid August at the earliest. If the money’s there.

I silently launched the donations page somewhere in early June, and created some links to it, including in what some visitors may (with some trouble) recognise as the main navigation. It’s been live for about four weeks now, and it has netted me the grand total of € 20, which amounts to € 18.57 after cost deduction.

I didn’t expect to grow rich instantly, but this is somewhat less than I was hoping. So I decided to make things official. And blackmail you. € 2,481.43 to go. Donate! Or else.

Update after 30 minutes: € 2,357.52 to go.

Update after 1 hour: € 2,115.74 to go.

Update after 3 hours and a bit: € 1,179.49 to go. This is really AWESOME! I'm ... I don't know ... wow ...

Update after 4.5 hours: donation drive succeeded. Wow, what a ride.