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This is a quick blurb about our financials last year and looking forward.
Last year we comfortably paid expenses and reduced our server costs. We ended up paying more for tax prep than originally was estimated, but we exceeded our funding goals by enough to afford that with a little breathing room. I'm optimistic this year will be similar, if not better overall; I believe that tax-costs will be lower, and we have no large expenses planned. Here is a rough breakdown of where the money is going:
- 54% Hosting/Backups/Domains
- 37% Taxes/Accounting
- 9% Administrative/Other
It's obviously frustrating that such a large amount of where we spend money is on taxes, but we should see that number come down as we mature.
Moving forward I'll be estimating all expected costs on a yearly basis, and then still continuing with goals on a half-year funding periods; this should make things more consistent and easier to understand. As usual I'll link to the current funding breakdown on the wiki from the beg-o-meter. My estimate is that we will spend about $6,000 this year, so that puts the beg-o-meter at $3,000 for each half. Thanks again for all of the support we receive that keeps this such a cool community for everyone.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:16PM
9% Adminsitrative/Other
Is the 'Other'-money going to be spent towards adding a spell checker to the story submission box?
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:22PM
Strangely enough, there is one for the Editors. You may now mock them for not using it on this story.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:01PM
TheMightyBuzzard is correct that there is a spell checker for the editors, except... it only appears during initial submission processing. When updating a story that is already queued to go out, the spell checker does not appear. Also, it is prone to false positives, as in: “testing this out” would suggest that these words were misspelled:
Thanks for pointing out the error — it's been corrected.
As an aside, you seem to have a keen eye for such things... we can always use new editors, even on a part-time basis. Reply here or contact someone in our IRC [soylentnews.org] channel, or just send an e-mail to admin@soylentnews.org expressing your interest.
Thanks again!
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 05 2016, @10:07PM
TheMightyBuzzard is correct that there is a spell checker for the editors, except... it only appears during initial submission processing. When updating a story that is already queued to go out, the spell checker does not appear. Also, it is prone to false positives
Maybe you should look into using something like Firefox's It's All Text! [mozilla.org] addon? It adds a configurable button to textareas that, when pressed, opens the text an external editor of your choosing. It works by watching the temporary file for changes and updating the field on save. It can be configured to also work on one-line text fields as well if needed. That would let you use a proper editor with decent spell checking at any point in the process, as long as there is some sort of text input available.
It also lets you take advantage of any other features of your editor of choice, like syntax highlighting, auto insertion, etc. I've been getting a lot of use out of it here by using IAT to open emacs and enabling the major mode "ham-mode". HAM stands for html-as-markdown; you compose your text as markdown and it transparently converts it to HTML on save. That means I can start a comment, open it in emacs, write in markdown, and then it shows up here as html and saves me a lot of work when I need formatting. As a bonus, I also get the spell check and any other useful modes as part of the deal.
It even works between previews, at least on comments. I can keep hitting preview and see the final output over and over and IAT keeps saving to the input box between loads because it's the same field. Only down side is I have to preview first, because the original post-comment field has a different ID or something, so IAT thinks it's a separate textarea.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @10:18PM
It would be nice if we could get Markdown mode on the site. Isn't the original Markdown written in Perl also?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday January 05 2016, @11:35PM
It would be nice if we could get Markdown mode on the site. Isn't the original Markdown written in Perl also?
I'm quoting this to hopefully give it visibility; I ran out of modpoints or I'd have just +1'd it instead.
And yeah, it was -- Markdown.pl -- and in addition, I'm sure CPAN has a markdown converter somewhere, probably alongside Devel::KitchenSink and Editor::Emacs.*
* Found 42 matches in CPAN's flat module list (here [cpan.org]), though four of them are the Markdown category itself. It also has 3 matches for Sink, 1 for KitchenSink, and 15 for Emacs, including its own Emacs:: category. I was close.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday January 07 2016, @03:58AM
Thanks for the suggestion about the "It's All Text!" add-on. I just downloaded and installed it, and this is my first try at using it.
Worked well on the first try... very nice!
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Tuesday January 05 2016, @06:35PM
Speak for yourself... no spell check shows in my interface.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson