September

As soon as I post this message, this blog will have 30,203 posts on it. I have posted 214 "encore" reruns so as soon as I put up eleven more new posts, there will be 30,000 unique posts on this blog. I think this calls for a celebration, don't you? Well, it calls for something

Since I started this thing in December of 2000, I have turned down all outside offers to "monetize." Usually, they've been proposals to move the whole thing to some huge website to attract readers there so they might be sold all manner of merch. All such offers promised I would retain complete editorial control of what I did but when I asked, "What if I write about how some item you're selling is a piece of junk?", I never got a satisfactory answer. Come to think of it, I never got an answer.

So here I remain under no umbrella but my own. I accept no paid advertising unless you count the Amazon links. They used to pay for my outta-pocket expenses at maintaining the blog but in the last few years, those costs have gone way, way up and the income from the links and donations have gone way, way down. I just paid my hosting company in advance for the next twelve months and because my software here is getting old, I'm going to need to find someone to rewrite the code for this blog.

I wrote it myself when I first adopted this design but it took forever and a month. Since then, I've forgotten most of what I learned then and even if I remembered it all, there have since been all sorts of advances in technology that are far beyond my comprehension. I'll probably need to find someone I can pay to do the upgrade rewrite. So I've decided to run a little telethon for the month of September. I want to see if I can get enough donations this month to cover the entire operating costs of newsfromme.com for the next twelve…but I'll settle, as we all usually have to do in life, for what I can get.

If you have enjoyed this blog for however long you've been reading it, try and send me some loot. Ten or twenty bucks would be nice but please…if it makes a difference in your life, don't. This blog will not go away if I get bupkis.