Posted on 08/26/2011 9:35:57 AM PDT by marktwain
What can we do to help Jim Robinson keep freerepublic robust and online? Freerepublic is important to me and I am willing to pay to keep it up and robust. I believe that many other freepers believe this as well.
I do not overstate things when I say that the health of freerepublic is essential to the health of the nation and the restoration of the Constitution.
Would it be worthwhile to create a backup fund for freerepublic to buy more equipment/bandwidth/alternate mirror sites?
This is Jim's site, and I will certainly defer to his wishes, but if we can help with money, time, or expertise, let us do so.
There’s an easy solution:
DONATE MONTHLY.
Free Republic has become part of the fabric of many lives around here.
Make it part of yours: Ante Up
Five bucks a month will do it if everyone does it.
C’mon...
Hmm, maybe FR be needing a little QE3 or at least some stimulus from Obamao’s stash.
This site needs a complete overhaul. How about upgrading the site to something that resembles 2011, and not 1998?
Deep underground bunker with geothermal power and radiation hardened servers?
MoDo bump.
How would you like it changed? Would you prefer flashing advertisements and lots of pictures?
I like it just the way it is—functional and packed with information.
I didn’t mean you specifically, marktwain.
I was referring to a group.
What you are talking about would cost some money. We could start a FR upgrade fund, couldn’t we? I have barely any money, but I could scrape together a contribution...
Anyone else up for it?
They do an amazing job here considering what little $$$ they have to work worth.
This site is worth a lot of money. If you consider that the Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $300 million this site is very valuable. Huffington Post was not worth that much, of course, but even if you heavily discount it this site is still worth a pretty pennny.
I understand that making money has never been the goal here. I have posted before that I think that sensible advertising here would be fine. I understand that Jim does not want that but IMHO it is the American way to make a buck and the Robinsons certainly deserve something for all their hard work.
I’d suggest that the site be monitized in some sensible ways besides the way the site is funded tosday.
I like it exactly as it is. Clean and simple interface. Uncluttered.
100% agree that Jim has done an incredible job. It is a non-trivial undertaking to create a robust and reliable non-static web site like FR. I don’t know much about the architecture of FR, but from what I have gathered, it suffers from a design that has single points of failure.
My personal suggestion would be to re-design the site to eliminate single points of failure, while at the same making it such that it can be hosted in one of the new compute clouds, such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure.
Those are non-trivial tasks, however.
Besides contributing $80K per quarter?
Don’t post vanities.
I agree with you. The client-facing code could be better streamlined to reduce overall bandwidth usage, for example. There should be no tables, and all CSS should be in a stylesheet. Just making those two tweaks could save a good deal of bandwidth. Oh, the HR tags could be done in CSS as well.
I’ve got to agree. I love the simplicity and the number of posts that fit in a single fast-loading page.
I understand it's Jim's site, and he runs it as he likes, but that's how I feel about it. Making everyone chip in even 2$ a month would eliminate this problem, and not break anyone's bank.
I like the simple look.
No, it wouldn’t cost much money to make some minor client-facing coding tweaks. Just a few changes to the CSS and HTML could save a lot of bandwidth, and consequently a lot of money. I could make the changes in a day.
I just did a quick view source on this page and there are no tables. Each post is within a classed div. PERL is the problem. Now the posting page is indeed in tables, but it’s minimal HTML and shouldn’t cause performance issues. Porting to PHP or JSP would be a very large effort. I’m not sure what DB is used, but that might also be a performance drag.
Otherwise the presentation layer is good overall and simple. Changing the presentation layer would cause a whole lot of grief for users.
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