Techrights' Winter of Change
TWENTY years ago (September 2003) I started my Ph.D. and it went on for a couple of years before I started to wrap things up. In 2006 I started writing my thesis and at the same time this site was born. I didn't know it would consume so much time and I kept working on research for a living* while seldom naming employers (because Microsoft goons would contact and harass them to take away my bread). We're fast approaching 40,000 articles, set aside documents, multimedia, wiki pages etc. For comparison's sake, my personal blog, which I started in 2004, has 2,716 posts in it. Tux Machines is also very large, but most of the pages there are not original.
As loyal readers are aware, I never made any money from any of those sites; they're run at the expense of those who operate them (and keep a job on the side to make a living, i.e. food, roof, hosting bills). We don't want to ask for money and we also know people already struggle financially regardless (the global economy is waning without end in sight). So all we ask for, as winter approaches, is moral support. Running the site isn't just a 'full-time job' (without a salary); it takes more than 40 hours per week, sometimes more than 80 hours per week. It's not about money because, as Thomas Grzybowski explained last week, social recognition comes in many forms. Life isn't about hoarding and showing off.
The winter holidays are fast approaching, starting with Halloween next week. A week later we celebrate our site anniversary and we're gratified to have "modernised" everything by removing unnecessary bloat, resulting in a much faster site that is also a lot cheaper to run. █
_____
* This was not entirely disconnected; critical skills, research skills and coding skills improved a lot owing to it, even if I no longer work in the domain I specialised in at university (I left that behind in 2012, 16 months after I had joined Sirius for steady income, doing only Free software).