I started rubyland.news a few years ago because it was a thing I wanted to see for the Ruby community. I had been feeling a shrinking of the ruby open source collaborative community, it felt like the room was emptying out.
I wanted to make people writing about ruby and what they were doing with it visible to each other and to the community, in order to try to (re)build/preserve/strengthen a self-conception as a community, connect people to each other, provide entry to newcomers, and just make it easier to find ruby news.
I develop and run rubyland.news in my spare time, as a hobby project, all by myself, on custom Rails software. I have never and will never accepted money for editorial placement — the feeds included in rubyland.news are exclusively based on my own judgement of what will serve readers and the community well.
Why am I asking for money?
The total cost of Rubyland News, including hosting and the hostname itself, are around $180 a month. Current personal regular monthly donations add up to about $100 a year — from five individual sponsors (thank you!!!!)
I pay for this out of my pocket. I’m doing totally fine, no need to worry about me, but I do work for an academic non-profit, and don’t have the commercial market software engineer income some may assume.
Sure, I could run it somewhere cheaper than heroku (and eventually might have to) — but I’m doing all this in my spare time, I don’t want to spend an iota more time or psychic energy on (to me) boring operational concerns than I need to.
Some donations would also help motivate me to keep putting energy into this, showing me that the project really does have value to the community. If I am funded to exceed my costs, I might also add resources necessary for additional features (like a non-limited DB to keep a searchable history around?)
You can donate one-time or monthly on my Github Sponsors page. The suggested levels are $1 and $5 per month. If I get an increase in $5-$10/month more contributions this year, I will consider it a huge success, it really makes a difference!
If you donate $5/month or more, and would like to be publicly listed/thanked, I am very happy to do so, just let me know!
If you don’t want to donate or can’t spare the cash, but do want to send me an email telling me about your use of rubyland news, I would love that too! I really don’t get much feedback! And would love to know any features you want or need. (With formerly-known-as-twitter being on the downslide, are there similar services you’d like to see rubyland.news published to?) jonathan at rubyland.news)
Thanks
- Thanks to anyone who donates anything at all
- also to anyone who sends me a note to tell me that they value Rubyland News (seriously, I get virtually no feedback — telling me things you’d like to be better/different is seriously appreciated too! Or things you like about how it is now. I do this to serve the community, and appreciate feedback and suggestions!)
- To anyone who reads Rubyland News at all
- To anyone who blogs about ruby, especially if you have an RSS feed, especially if you are doing it as a hobbyist/community-member for purposes other than business leads!
- To my current monthly github sponsors, it means a lot!
- To anyone contributing in their own way to any part of open source communities for reasons other than profit, sometimes without much recognition, to help create free culture that isn’t just about exploiting each other!
Bibliographic Wilderness 