There comes that point in time where the fine line between politely asking for support morphs into screaming for help. I think I may have crossed that line.
12 days left and we haven’t budged from two days ago – still under half of our goal to prevent losing the Archive and shutting Past Daily down. It’s a shame, really. I know a lot of you have been very supportive of what we’re trying to do here, and a lot of you have chipped in what you can to make sure it continues.
But the sad reality is; when you come up short, you come up short. And the milk of human kindness seldom extends to the realm of the landlord – they want their money and they want it now. It’s the nature of things, and maybe why the world is in the state its in. They have their reasons – they are different than mine; each of us fail to understand why the other doesn’t understand.
I still believe we can pull this off – am still convinced there are enough of you out there who believe that history is important, and knowing about aspects of the past make understanding the present a lot easier, and maybe the future less terrifying.
At last count, we’re getting upwards of 2,000 people per day coming to the site; exploring, reading and listening – downloading for future reference. Telling your friends and expressing your support is wonderful and it keeps me going. It’s been a slow climb to gather a larger audience – I need roughly 10 times that amount each day and I do my best to get the word out to as many places and to as many people as I can – it’s the chipping away process.
Unfortunately, it’s just me – I am the only one who digitizes the collection, preserves the collection, writes the posts, scans the photos and hits “publish”. I do on average of 3 posts per day – 5 or more if I am not interested in sleeping. It is intensive work and it absorbs 12-18 hours a day of my life. But when its a labor of love, when I feel a sense of accomplishment for a day of hard work, it energizes rather than exhausts. But lack of sleep is still lack of sleep – and that doesn’t prevent me from falling, head-first in front of the computer mid-sentence, into a state of unconsciousness for an undetermined amount of time. It explains the typos and run-on sentences.
All that by way of saying I need your support. Your tax-deductible chip-in to keep this thing going and help make it better is desperately needed. I’m not asking for a lot – if each of Past Daily’s 2,000 daily visitors chipped in $2.00 we’d hit our goal within seconds; simple. And I wouldn’t need to gum up your weekends with my endless screams for help.
But we’re smack in the middle of hard economic times. And chipping in, even at the price of a Cafe Americano, can be a hardship rather than a luxury. And I’m not asking you to chip in. If you still want to help, tell your friends – tell the people around you there’s a site that runs a lot of different things every day. Some of it’s old, some of it’s so old that it’s new and some of it’s new to the point nobody has heard about it yet. We need your support by your contributions, but we also need your support by just showing up and being here.
We’re heading into the 2nd to last weekend of our Fundraiser. Please click on the link below and give what you can. It’s tax-deductible and it goes to a good cause – every cent goes into maintaining what we’re trying to do here. I’m here because you’re here. Simple as that.
Until next time . . .
