crowdfunding – Page 11

08 March 201508 March 2015

Weekly Wrap 248: Logic, rants, and a pleasing balance

My week of Monday 2 to Sunday 8 March 2015 was productive, although not everything happened in the sequence that I’d intended, and not everything has appeared yet.

Articles

Australian lawmakers can’t use phones, will vote on data retention, ZDNet Australia, 3 March 2015. It’s kind of a rant, but now that the internet has been commercially available in Australia for 20 years, such ignorance is inexcusable.

I also wrote a feature story and another column for ZDNet Australia, but they’re both still working their way through the production pipeline.

Podcasts

“The 9pm Shut Up It’s Called Logic”, being The 9pm Edict episode 38. It’s also available on SoundCloud. This is another hour-long episode, which took about 10 hours to produce, what with all the ancillary tasks.
I also wrote up the results of “The 9pm Summer Scrounge”, the rather half-based subscriber drive for The 9pm Edict.

5at5

There were actually six editions of 5at5 this week, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. You should subscribe, you know.

Media Appearances

On Monday I was quoted at Telecom Ramblings by Don Sambandaraksa:

Gemalto 3G/4G SIMs must be “…ultra-mega super-magical. With extra cyber unicorns,” ZDNet Australiaâ€™s Stilgherrian said of its ability to be secure even though keys were compromised.
On Tuesday night, I spoke about various tech stories on ABC 702 Sydney, but there’s no recording.
On Thursday, I spoke about Airpnp and sharing economy on ABC 105.7 Darwin.

Corporate Largesse

I received a copy of the second novel in John Birminghamâ€™s new series, Resistance: A Dave Hooper Novel 2, which is rather lovely. I’ll be reading it soon, because I really liked the first book in this series.

The Week Ahead

Monday will be a day of communication and planning, wrapping up with drinks and, I suspect, dinner with friends in Katoomba. Tuesday is not yet allocated to anything specific.

Wednesday will see a day trip to Sydney for a lunchtime briefing by MuleSoft. Thursday will probably see another long commute for a morning briefing by Deloitte, although I may just dial in instead. Somewhere in there, I’ll write a column for ZDNet Australia.

Friday through Saturday are unplanned at this stage. But since I didn’t visit Albion Park today to watch Qantas land their Boeing 747, I may visit the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) for one its open days — which can be any of those three days. I’ll have to figure out which would work best, given the rest of my schedule.

Further Ahead

I’ll be in Melbourne from Tuesday 17 to Sunday 22 March for the Cisco LIVE event and then a couple days of meetings and the like. If you feel the need to catch up, or any other urges, please let me know.

[Photo: Downpour at Katoomba station, photographed on 1 March 2015. Technically that’s outside the timespan covered by this post, but I’m beyond caring any more.]

03 September 201422 September 2014

Announcing “The 9pm Operation Budget Repair”

It’s time to heed the words of the Prime Minister. Clarity of purpose, that’s what we need more generally on this arsehat-ridden island continent. I’ve been trying to bring it to you, through this, the finest goat-oriented political and social commentary podcast in the galaxy. But it’s not enough.

This podcast needs to happen weekly. This podcast needs your help now.

“The 9pm Operation Budget Repair” is a subscriber drive for The 9pm Edict, the same as with community broadcasters — or public broadcasters, as the Americans call them.

The target is to get enough subscribers on board by the end of September to allow this podcast to go weekly — because I think it needs to be weekly to get into the rhythm of things.

The full details are on the Skank Media website at skank.com.au/repair â€” the targets, the subscriptions on offer, the things you can do to help if you’ve already subscribed â€” and in coming days I’ll be adding progress reports and further suggestions.

You can listen to the announcement below. But if you want all of the podcast episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or subscribe automatically in iTunes, or go to SoundCloud.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:49 — 3.0MB)

[Credits: Audio of Tony Abbott via ABC Radio’s AM. The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]

26 May 201426 May 2014

“Tip Stilgherrian” page operational, with few glitches

Now that I’ve run two successful crowdfunding campaigns through Pozible, I’m starting to set up systems to accept direct payments for my various projects. The first, a page to accept one-off donations was mostly straightforward.

I chose to use Stripe as the card payment service because I already had a Stripe account for my second Pozible project, The 9pm Resurrection.

While Stripe is still in beta in Australia, Pozible already uses it to handle recurring subscription payments, and I’d already received an invitation into the beta program. I figured it made sense to keep all my payments in one place.

Plus I’ll eventually be using Memberful to process subscriptions, and that also uses Stripe.

To integrate Stripe into this WordPress site, I used the free plugin WP Stripe from Human Made Limited. This provided me with one payment form per website, which is all I needed for this task. I also installed the WP Stripe Email Receipts plugin by Philip Newcomer.

All that went smoothly. I installed the plugins, activated them, entered my Stripe account keys and a template for the email receipts — and they just worked.

The only difficulties came with configuring Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on the web server, and that was down to a bug I encountered in the WHM/cPanel hosting management software while I was installing the SSL certificate. That’s nothing to do with Stripe or WordPress or the plugins, of course, just my dodgy web server.

I’ll document that bug over the fold. Meanwhile, why not try out the system and give me a tip? Was that too blatant?

Continue reading ““Tip Stilgherrian” page operational, with few glitches”

29 April 201429 April 2014

The 9 O’Clock Resurrection hits Target 1

My project to resurrect The 9pm Edict reached the initial target on Saturday — thank you — but there’s a few minutes left, so I’m hoping that we might get something up beyond that.

Here’s how things looked as we started the day today.

Chart of progress in The 9 O'Clock Resurrection

The upper line shows the total commitments so far, and where that line ends up at 0847 AEST today will determine what happens in May.

The lower line shows just the cumulative subscriptions, and where that ends up will provide the starting-point for crowdfunding June’s budget.

I’ll run another Pozible campaign around the third week of May, probably ending around 21 May. That will set the production pool for June — that is, the subscriptions continuing from this campaign, plus any new subscriptions, plus any one-off pledges. However I’ll also be investigating other ways to organise the subscriptions and perhaps some commercial sponsorship.

~~I’ll post a brief update once the Pozible campaign finishes this morning, and a longer explainer tonight.~~

Meanwhile you can watch my daily progress videos, which ceased on the weekend because I was distracted by a computer rebuild.

[Update 1110 AEST: The final total raised for the May production pool was $1082, so that’s two episodes confirmed for the month. We “only” have $304 in ongoing subscriptions, which isn’t quite enough to fund podcasts in June â€” yet. There will be further fundraising before then, so stay tuned. I’m currently feeling quite confident that I can build on this base â€” but I’ll have more on that tonight.]

28 April 2014

Returning after computer grief

I hate these little “sorry I’m late with everything” notes, but I am late with everything — because I ended up in software upgrade hell over the weekend, and that took away two days of my life. But I’m back, and most of those problems have been dealt with.

What I can tell you quickly is that my Pozible campaign has been successful, and The 9pm Edict podcast will be returning. There’s funding committed for at least two episodes in May, but there’s still just under 11 hours left in the crowdfunding campaign so there may be more.

There will definitely be an update before lunchtime tomorrow, Tuesday.

23 April 2014

The 9 O’Clock Resurrection halfway to Target 1

My project to resurrect The 9pm Edict has reached the halfway mark on its way to the initial target — but comments from some supporters have led me to believe that I need to better explain the funding model.

I’m establishing a monthly funding, planning and production cycle for the podcast.

The current Pozible project is the first of what will be continuing monthly fundraising campaigns. When it ends on 29 April, I’ll know how much money is in the production pool for May — that’s all the one-off contributions plus the first month of the subscriptions. I’ll then be able to lock in the production schedule for that month.

Here’s how things looked as we started the day today.

Continue reading “The 9 O’Clock Resurrection halfway to Target 1”