The owner of kottke.org has quit his job to do blogging full-time and he is asking readers to help him out:
I recently quit my web design gig and — as of today — will be working on kottke.org as my full-time job. And I need your help.
I’m asking the regular readers of kottke.org (that’s you!) to become micropatrons of kottke.org by contributing a moderate sum of money to help enable me to edit/write/design/code the site for one year on a full-time basis. If you find kottke.org valuable in any way, please consider giving whatever you feel is appropriate.
I thought about doing it fulltime, too, but have nightmares of me sitting in front of CompUSA in the gutter, holding a sign that says “Will Link For Food. Heh.” MORE:
This will be a one-time “fund drive” lasting 3 weeks, you may make contributions via PayPal, credit card, or check, there will be some great gifts as an incentive for you to give (more details here), and your contributions will be the primary means of support for the site. And yes, I have absolutely no idea if this will work and I’m completely nervous and exhilarated by the challenges ahead.
If you’re uncertain as to whether you want to become a kottke.org micropatron, please read on. I’m going to explain what it is I’ll actually be doing, why I’m doing it, how the site might change, and what I’ll be doing with your hard-earned money.
And if you read on, you find that he goes through what a LOT of people who do blogs goes through: due to pride of ownership/publishing, the blogging becomes serious stuff and less of a larkish-hobby. It becomes a matter of pride and there are some days it isn’t fun anymore. But you’ve made a commitment. To wit:
I almost quit last spring. The site was getting out of hand and wasn’t fun anymore. It was taking me away from my professional responsibilities, my social life, and my relationship with my girlfriend. There was no room in my life for it anymore. As you can imagine, thinking of quitting what had been the best thing in my life bummed me right the hell out.
After thinking about it for a few weeks, I had a bit of an epiphany. The real problem was the tension between my web design career and my self-publishing efforts; that friction was unbalancing everything else. One of them had to go, and so I decided to switch careers and pursue the editing/writing of this site as a full-time job.
So it’s about balance, which doesn’t impact TMV, who prides himself on consistent imbalance.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.