More Help Needed
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Show Your Appreciation |
- Amy V.
- Robert C.
- Gord N.
These three people stepped up to the plate and donated their hard earned money toward Daily Cup of Tech. If we are going to get me working that one day a week exclusively for Daily Cup of Tech (we are a bit behind for the month as we should be at about 36% but we are actually only at about 4.23%), this is how it will be done: through donations!
In many ways, I really hate asking for donations because it feels like begging or panhandling. This is not what I want to be. If that were the case, I’d put up one of those “Give Me a Dollar” websites which I completely abhor.
What I do want is to be able to spend as much of my time as possible giving you the readers what you want and I can not do this alone. I feel your support by all of the traffic that you send my way and your participation in the comments but I also need your financial support.
One of the great things about Daily Cup of Tech is that we are an ever expanding and growing group. And there is strength in numbers. If every single person who subscribed to the RSS feed were to donate one dollar per month, not only would I be able to quit my one day a week job, I’d be able to work on Daily Cup of Tech full time!
So, I am asking you to please, if you can afford even a dollar or two, please consider using the Tip Jar at the top of the page to improve Daily Cup of Tech. Of course, I will also accept larger donations! 
Go and do this right now before reading any further!
I also received a really good idea from Andrew who suggested that I should set up a regular automatic monthly withdrawal so that people do not need to remember to donate monthly. This is an awesome idea and I just need to get all of the kinks worked out before I implement it.
A big thanks also goes out to AlwaysWebHosting for their continued support in hosting Daily Cup of Tech. Not having to worry about a monthly hosting bill makes a big difference. Thanks, guys!
If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?
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8 Responses to “More Help Needed”
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AlDyIDrmAbtSoccr Says:
August 12th, 2007 at 4:08 pmhey Tim I don’t mean to be critical (you have the initiative and effort and stuff to actually keep a good blog running for a long time(a year on september first!)), but just a suggestion maybe you should do one of your like technical articles because I just looked through recent posts and besides the posts about the blog you have written a few about the reporter at defcon a couple youtube videos and the last time you wrote something like technical was august second. I personally have not donated to DCOT because I’m a full time student playing a sport with no job, but it might be a nice change for sore eyes to have a post about something technical. I’m not saying they all should be technical, just toss a few in. I think your are doing a great job and will be sad if it has to be reduced to once a week. Good luck!
P.S. i’m probably totally out of my place here, but maybe you could get someone else to be a co-writer because I’m sure there are half a million people who would jump for it (and volunteer)
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Chris R. Says:
August 12th, 2007 at 7:35 pmI have quite a few feeds to tech blogs. I can’t recall any of them soliciting money. I understand it must be tough sometimes, but IMHO it makes your credibility slip.
Personally, I would buy a “Daily Cup of Tech” coffee cup that you could sell for a profit. Or even a 32 mb thumb drive preloaded with some of your USB programs. But a straight up donation? I don’t know.
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JC Says:
August 13th, 2007 at 9:13 amI agree with the two people having posted before me (AlDy and Chris R.).
First, with AlDy because I personally find the quality of the blog to be steadily decreasing (not on the quality of writing, but rather on quality of contents and matters discussed) : in my opinion, in terms of insight, we are far from the FreeNAS and insightful post about how to make use of AutoIt (knowing to use it is one thing, showing concrete problems solved thanks to it is another one which is as helpful).
The only think I liked recently was the Dead DC series because it included your personal experiences and interesting point of views, approaches, etc : it is what I’m looking for when reading a blog… insights, opinions, anecdotes, and of course, if there is very informative material like the FreeNAS tutorials once in a while, it is even better.
It is in my opinion these things that makes a blog different than other medias.To be honest, I was quite disapppointed by the security week, except the post on how to secure Wireless properly which was very comprehensive and accurate and probably took you a very long time : after that, I expected a bit more than parts of videos from a rather IT-uninformed show with blonde babes everywhere (I don’t blame you for that, you weren’t director for this show after all ;-p), but I guess that time was lacking and writing complex articles is VERY time consuming and exhausting.
What I missed in this Security Week, for example, were things like your opinions on vulnerabilities disclosure, which would have generated a lot of interesting debates in the comments, the truth behind what happens when MS releases patches (that it they are immediatly analyzed with tools making it really easy to spot which code has changed and hence understand what the vulnerability was an how to reproduce it)…
Of course, days are only 24 hours long and these hours are probably quite busy for you and I am not blaming you for not having written about this or anything, but I just sometimes can’t help that sometimes, you should take a break and give something more time if it needs to : nobody is giving you deadlines or holding a gun at you at point blank and I guess that nobody will be mad if you don’t post in a week to come up with a really great article at the end of that week.To come back to my main point, some people seem to find less and less interesting contents here (but I don’t doubt that some are happy with the way it is, though) and to be honest, I’m starting to wonder why I come back checking this site every day : the signal/noise is simply getting quite low : I see more and more articles about how to make a blog popular and financially rentable than real tech opinions and insight.
The twice-a-week donations reminders aren’t making things better to help this signal/noise either.To me, it is no wonder the donations are starting to decrease : you can not use and reuse the same method everytime and expect the same results everytime you say : “sorry, wasn’t enough after all : more help needed please !”
You first started with ads… don’t have much a problem with that, especially since you had hosting to pay at that time.
Then the tip jar : if people want to donate on their own, why not, it is up to them, especially if they are not harassed to do it…
Then the “Buy the source code” to some AutoIt programs and now the “Become My Boss” thing for which people are supposed to keep donating $100 every month to possibly read more interesting articles or in bigger number.It seems to me you are currently spending more time multiplicating the ways to make money than focus on making your blog better quality-wise, and in the meantime, you don’t pay hosting anymore since the AlwaysWebHosting folks are kind enough to offer it every month.
This alone should probably a big help and boost since that money used to go to hosting and not into compensating the time you spend writing here.If you are too busy, overworked, or just tired, do not write an article per day on the blog and rather focus on a quite nice one per week if needed.
It is true that to be a popular reader, you have to post a lot, but unless you find a way to indeed work full-time on the blog, it is not possible for an human being with a work and a family to take care of, to do that.I already wrote similar things a while ago when I felt this blog was getting headed to a dangerous direction, and now, we are right into it.
There are many interesting blogs out there, and the competition is simply too rude for you to expect readers to provide you with $100 per month when quality content is everywhere and for free…
If you keep doing things that way, I’m afraid that you will upset your reader-base and exhaust the gold mine of the part of them wanting to financially support you once in a while.In short, here are the friendly advices from a regular reader: stop wanting this blog to grow big faster and/or bigger than it can, refocus on the essentials and the origins of what made this blog popular in the first place, provide alternative ways for readers to support you (send articles to you : as AlDy wrote, I’m sure a lot of people here have skills and area of expertise and could provide you with occassional posts without becoming official team members), sell goodies (at a price you make some profit out of it) : the reader gets something physical and it still supports you : don’t forget geeks like goodies and show them off!), and watch your happy reader-base donate more on their own because they will be happy with maybe less frequent, but of greater quality posts.
Of course, you are a more experienced blogger than I’ll probably ever be, but that were my opinions regarding a blog that I used to like reading when I had 5 minutes during a long CPU intensive process…
Probably that even if you lose my readership, you will get 10 new readers in the meantime, so probably don’t care much, but I still wanted to express these opinions one last time, especially since I seem to not be alone to think similar stuff.
Thanks,
JC.
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Tim Fehlman Says:
August 13th, 2007 at 9:25 amThe feedback that I have received this weekend has been a great eye opener to me. I took yesterday to sit back and look at the content over the past couple of months and I have to agree whole heartedly with the comments made here.
I will be making an announcement later today regarding this and the future of Daily Cup of Tech.
Thank you for caring enough to be honest.
Tim
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Chris R. Says:
August 13th, 2007 at 3:54 pm“I will be making an announcement later today regarding this and the future of Daily Cup of Tech.”
Just don’t quit. We do like you.
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Chris Says:
August 14th, 2007 at 12:12 pmI sorta came into this late.However, I was a little surprised by how quickly you became disheartened, but I like anyone who regularly visits would love to help support you. I just don’t have enough charity in my heart for a ‘donation’.
But the ideas of coffee cups and loaded and themed USB drives for sale are real winners and might net you a more positive response.
Honestly, their are a few dozen other tech blogs out there and the thing that really set you apart was your technical writing. Leave the fluff for BoingBoing, you can’t compete with those numbers, but in quality, they’ll be linking to you.
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August 14th, 2007 at 3:38 pm@Chris:
I think that I take this whole blogging thing too seriously and too personally. I do need to lighten up and realize that it’s just a blog!
Tim
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SMcG Says:
August 16th, 2007 at 8:39 pmI found this site by Googling for AutoIt scripts. I was just learning AutoIt and thought this would be quite the repository for useful scripts and it has been to an extent. Personally I would probably buy a coffee mug with your logo on it (I like puns) to help support the site if I could have more useful scripting info.
