I’ve finally sold my soul to the devil and set up a PayPal merchant account. There’s a discrete little “tip jar” button over there to the right which you can click to make a small payment (or a large one, if you want) into that account. Or you can click here.

I used to have a tip jar just like it back before Amazon discontinued their honor system program. Now I have one again. This isn’t an earth-shattering development. There are a million blogs and every single one has a tip jar. The only difference between mine and all the others is that this money would go to me.

It’s not of huge importance on the grand scale of things. There are far needier people. But the fact is that I’m looking at a new financial regime here, in which the upcoming renewal expenses on both the domain name and the web server space constitute a suddenly much larger percentage of my gross income. For a while back in 2007-2008 this site more than paid for itself, between a hundred bucks a month in text link ads and a couple dozen sales of the Zeke book each month. The ads stopped coming in about a year ago, and in the time since the book has sold very few copies. Sales of photographic prints, cards and calendars have amounted to significantly less than a hundred dollars a year since I started offering them in early 2008.

The once solid – if sporadic – source of income this site has had has been donations from readers, and I remain grateful for those. For a while, though, there’s been no easy way for people to toss some cash into the hat. Now there is one.

I like this site and it would be nice not to have to worry whether I can afford to keep it. A year ago I was weighing the cost and benefit of different add-ons, for instance the hundred dollar one that would let people sign in to comment with their Facebook Account and such. Now that seems prohibitive unless someone thinks it’s a good enough idea to fund it. I know there are alternatives to running my own site, from finding some sciencey network to pay me 40 bucks a month to blog for them instead to setting up a WordPress blog for free to not writing online at all. All those options have benefits to recommend them.

But I’m not ready to give this site up yet, and I’d prefer not to have to worry about the bills coming due in a couple months. If you like this site too, consider tossing some cash at PayPal in my name. You don’t need to have a PayPal account to do so: a plain old credit card will do.

Thanks.

1. 
   Jim 2011 02 17 at 6:38:19 pm

   Roger that. Please keep writing. Please keep fighting the good fight!

2. 
   Matt Wilkes 2011 02 17 at 7:01:45 pm

   Chris-

   Might wanna check those PayPal links. They weren’t working for me like they should be.
   Good Luck!

   -Matt

3. 
   Chris Clarke 2011 02 17 at 8:15:02 pm

   Fixed, Matt. Thanks for the heads up!