Comment Preview Feature

I added a comment preview feature, courtesy of Il Filosofo. Seems to be working great and wasn’t much trouble to get working. The only problem I’m seeing is that if I click on the W3C XHTML 1.0 link to validate the page, it complains that the page is not valid because no doctype is found. But there is a doctype, and if I view source and then manually paste that in to the W3C form, it validates fine. The only thing different from other pages I validate on here is that the url ends in .php. Does the validator make some kind of assumption when it sees that? My OCD will compel me to figure this out, but my ADD may allow me to wait until I attend to other things first.

Maybe this new feature will provide that added incentive you’ve been waiting for to chime in once in a while. You can now test drive your pearls of wisdom before committing them to eternal display here at movingtofreedom.org.

WordPress Plugins, Free Software, and Money

I have to say again, it’s just super how many great WordPress plugins there are out there, and that people usually follow the lead of WordPress and release their work under the GNU GPL.

With recent discussions and thoughts on how we’ll make money off of free stuff, I was thinking I should try setting an example by making more donations for the free software I use. I’ve given to a few free software projects and freedom-related organizations in the past, but not that many, and not consistently.

There’s danger here, of course. I don’t want to be seen as patting myself on the back and putting on a big show of it. (Especially when I’m not talking about large amounts.) And if you make things like this public, it opens the floor for all kinds of questions, like how come this much for one project and that much for another? How come you don’t donate for all the free software you use? And so on. Well, I’ll explain some things, but I won’t feel obligated to justify everything (or anything). A lot of decisions will be gut-feel-spur-of-the-moment kinds of things. I think I would tend to favor smaller projects, although I’m not ruling out larger ones. Sometimes I can see paying right away, and other times after using the software for a while and appreciating its value.

For example, I mentioned in a previous post that I dropped $2 in a tip jar for the absoluteRSS plugin. That was the first plugin I donated something for. Why? There’s not much to it, and I’m using other plugins that represent a lot more effort. I think because in this case it solved a more pressing need. I wanted to get images working in my FeedBurner feed. I was prepared to invest time in coding something myself. This plugin saved me that time, and the author, Robert Accettura, had a low pressure pitch and convenient payment method. So I donated a couple of bucks. Not a fortune. Not especially noteworthy. But it’s this kind of thing that can help drive the sharing culture more. Imagine the number of people you can reach and help on the Internet. There are a lot of WordPress blogs out there and FeedBurner is a popular service. What if 200 people found this plugin useful and paid $2 for it. That’s $400 for a something that didn’t take Robert very long to create.

With the other plugins I’m using, I’ll go through and see if people are looking for donations on their site and kick something in if so. And I have $25 penciled in to send to WordPress. I wanted to send money to Akismet for spam-filtering but they haven’t answered my email asking if there is a way to donate for a non-commercial site.

We’ll see what happens with the chronicling of free software donations. I feel kind of funny about posting that kind of information in public, but I also want to support free software production and put my money where my mouth is.

And there is a self-serving motivation. If I keep this blog going and provide useful/entertaining information/software, I’d like to ask you for your support someday. Donating to random, obscure web sites would therefore be a good meme to spread. :-)