A good overview of advantages and disadvantages of not having comments on your blog, an approach more and more writers take.

For most people, a comment form is an essential part of what a blog is, and most of us enjoy the opportunity to leave feedback (even if we do so only rarely). But there are also plenty of possible reasons why comments are unnecessary, or undesirable.

http://mattgemmell.c...comments-commentary/
http://s.vandragt.co...g-comments-on-or-off

New Humble Bundle:

see: http://www.humblebundle.com/

Glowing review of Botanicula:
http://www.rockpaper...-i-think-botanicula/

Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and then program a bunch of free software games that use it.

Liberated Pixel Cup brings together some powerful allies: Creative Commons, OpenGameArt, the Free Software Foundation, and you.

-http://lpc.opengameart.org/

Phase one runs for the entire month of June and involves making the art assets.

Phase two runs for the entire month of July and involves making games with the art assets.

And even if you aren't an artist or game programmer you can still help out by donating:

Liberated Pixel Cup will be awesome, but it can't happen without the help of people like you!

We're paying artists for comissions on the artwork for the initial style guide, and we'd like to give away prizes for those who win the competition.  You can help make this project all the more awesome with your donation!

-http://lpc.opengameart.org/

Read more about the Liberated Pixel Cup.

Thank you to everyone who donated during the 7th Anniversary Fundraiser Celebration of DonationCoder.com. On April 15th we reached our goal of $7,000 dollars raised!

(That's enough to pay for 16 months of our server hosting costs!)

We asked for your support to help us keep doing what we do, and you responded. Your donations are our sole source of funding, so when we say that without you the site would not exist -- we mean it. But more than that, your support motivates us to work harder to make the site better and more useful to people just like you.

ps. Stay tuned to our website -- the success of the fundraiser has caused us to redouble our site makeover work and we have some great improvements just around the corner.

1. Newsletter Editorial

Greetings and welcome to yet another DonationCoder newsletter!

First things first: It's the 7th Anniversary of the site, and we are having a fundraiser.  There is currently a big fun thermometer bar at the top of our site, starring Cody our bird/duck mascot, which you can use to track our progress to our modest fundraising goal.  Our plan is to only run the fundraiser till the April 15, so if you want to join the effort you don't have much time.

If you like what we do, if you enjoy the newsletters, the forum discussions, or are a user of one of our software programs, I do hope you will take the time to make a donation to our site, of any amount.  We rely on the voluntary contributions of people just like you to keep the site going and to help us improve it.  If you are shy about making an online payment to the site using PayPal or one of the other payment providers we use, you can also send us a check, cash, diamonds, gold, cat slippers, oil paintings, or even candy from foreign lands.

And if you are a user of our software but you've never stopped by to check out our forum discussions, I hope you will decide that this is the perfect time to do so -- we are a very friendly bunch and we always love to have more people participate; or drop by our text chat channel (just click the CHAT button at the top of the forum) to waste some time talking nonsense with the regulars.

In addition to asking you, as an individual, to take the time to donate to the site, I want to try something slightly different for this year's fundraiser, and reach out to any commercial entities that may be reading this whether they are small or large business owners.  The approach we have taken with our software is to make it free both for personal use, but also for home office or small office use, or for individual commercial use.  We only require commercial licensing for companies that are deploying our software on many computers.  If you think your large business would be interested in a site license for one of the programs on our site, please do check out the commercial site license information page on our site (see link below), which also includes information on hiring us for custom software development work.

Which brings me to the last item I want to discuss in the newsletter, a new project I have been working on for the last several months (tentatively called YUMPS).  Over the years I have occasionally set up a custom website service that is user-content-driven, and have been frustrated with the lack of a core framework for such services.  There are existing content-management systems but my experience is that even the best and most flexible of them are poorly suited to custom web services that don't look and act like a standard content management system, and there are some excellent low-level coding frameworks, which require a huge amount of delicate work required to add the infrastructure needed for a user driven site (user accounts, registration, groups, administration back-end, etc.).  The idea of the project I am working on is to provide a mid-level core framework for programmers to use to create professional quality custom user-driven web services/sites.  It's a large and ambitious project, and you can read much more about it by following the link below.

Now the reason I wanted to mention the YUMPS project in this month's fundraiser newsletter is because I'm very interested in finding some commercial funding for the project that would allow me to devote even more of my time to it this year.  I'm hoping to be able to find a company or investor that would be interested in funding its development (perhaps leading to an Open Source release) -- perhaps in return for the side-by-side implementation of the specific features they are interested in for their projects.  If you know of someone who would might be interested, please pass this along and have them contact me.

Thank you for your indulgence with this month's newsletter editorial, and please don't forget to at least stop by our site and consider supporting us with a small donation during our fundraiser!

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