As you probably know by now, FOSS Force needs your help and we’re holding a fundraising campaign. You most likely figure we’re going to be doing a lot of begging, explaining exactly why you should support what we do here, and trying to guilt you into making a contribution. Yup, that’s how fundraising is done, so we’ll be doing a bit of all that. Most of all, however, we’re going to do our best to make this fun.
Ya see, “we’re wild and crazy guys” and gals — if we may steal some intellectual property from Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin and SNL. And not unlike the Czech brothers in the old skits, we’re refugees — in our case from the proprietary software world where we were caught throwing some rocks at Windows and OS X. But now that we’ve found software freedom, it’s time to party online with our Firefoxes, and raise the money we need in the process.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to only use cloud services when absolutely necessary. Web apps are great tools when you need to collaborate at a distance, but other than that you’re better off keeping your work on your own machines, for privacy reasons if nothing else.
You might have also noticed that the expansion began just after our May fundraising campaign in which you gave us $2,300 to improve our site. Thanks to you, we have been able to pay our writers — not much mind you, truthfully a small fraction of what they should be paid — which has been a key element to our improved coverage.
There was a time, back when FOSS Force was young, when we called the weekly round-up Friday FOSS Week in Review. Sometimes we’d get so far behind in our work that the Friday column wouldn’t get published until Saturday, sometimes late in the afternoon. To solve the problem that caused with the column’s title, we pulled a page from an old ABC playbook, from when they owned the Monday Night Football franchise, and called these late roundups “Friday FOSS Week in Review — Special Saturday Edition.” We didn’t change the header, but always made the “Saturday edition” mention in the text of the column, just as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
It’s almost Christmas, which means that the day isn’t far off when ol’ Father Time rolls the odometer over yet again. This, of course, is the time of year when news writers like to publish lists, partly because they’re easier to write than real news stories. It’s not that we’re lazy, mind you, we’re just too busy shopping and decorating and drinking egg nog…especially drinking egg nog. We love drinking egg nog.
When all browsers are on board, it’s certain that high traffic websites will adopt WebP as their graphics format of choice. Google is already converting most if not all graphics uploaded to Google+ to WebP to deliver to browsers supporting the format.