You’ll notice I put some kind of call to action on every article, to share the posts and to donate money to help me keep it running. I’d like you to understand why, so here’s a reveal:
The Globe is my best effort to turn my thirty to thirty-five years of blogging into a more polished-looking and independent magazine-format publication. If you do the math, you’ll see that I was blogging before there was an Internet, on my own BBS that I operated back then, on whatever matters occupied my attention. I still do that today – and my interests have become more “grown-up.”
Most of my early articles have been lost to crashed drives and later to blogging sites that crashed and burned, before I ran nine blogs on Blogspot (Blogger) for around sixteen years. Then earlier this year (2024) I started a WordPress installation on a virtual hosted server on Digital Pacific, an Australian hosting company. (Disclosure: I’ve since moved to Skyrack after discovering that DP ownership and support seem to all be offshore now. I find I’m actually more impressed with everything at Skyrack.) I’ve been using their services for various purposes for about the same length of time, have set up my IT clients with turnkey sites I made for them, that sort of thing.
Thing is, back then I was in paid work, freelancing my skills to make those sites, teaching clients how to maintain their sites, maintaining several IT maintenance and support contracts with SME companies. I’m now retired from IT and work, at first due to health reasons on a disability pension, and now on age pension. Neither is what you’d call a stellar income, and over three quarters of my superannuation was actually lost due to mis-management by the company my employer used.
So now my only income is my pension, and I’m using a chunk of it to pay the server fees, domain name fees, subscriptions to several news sources I sometimes use for research, and for subscriptions to some tools I use to keep things managed. There’s very little headroom in that equation, and I need to upgrade several subscriptions to allow for the growth of traffic and disk space, add a few extra features to the magazine itself, and to drive more traffic to it.
I write between two and six articles a week by myself while also trying to create Maker style recycling and cleantech, wood and metal work, garden and cooking, and artistic projects. Most of these projects are also paid for out of whatever discretionary money is left (not a lot, I’ll grant) and again, freeing up the fees I pay will allow me to finance those projects.
So any donation you make allows me to keep the six-percent-or-so portion of my pension that I currently spend on the most vital of those subscriptions and fees. Some months I still end up paying the full costs, but thanks to a few sporadic donors my pension gets some relief occasionally, which is a bonus.
There’s a few links at the very bottom of each page that let you visit Ko-Fi or Paypal and there you have a choice to make one-time or regular monthly donations to help me with the fees. Do it, it is always appreciated and allows me to make progress and more articles.
If you’re already a donor, thank you – you’re supporting something worthwhile.