I wish more sites would have a flattr (flattr.com) account. I'd easily "subscribe" to quirksmode, but I really don't want to manually send money to every single site I like.
Here's hoping he reaches his total. I just donated a good chunk on behalf of Mogotest. I wish I could pick up the whole thing, but we're still an early-stage bootstrapped company. Regardless, I think it's important to support the ecosystem. This is our second donation to community resources (the other was to http://firebreath.org/). I wish more companies would step up and help out in general.
"Therefore, if you go to the compatibility tables now, you’ll see a tasteful little sponsor bar at the bottom of every page with a well-known logo in it."
I can't see these any more so I think it fair to assume they don't.
I recently discovered CanIUse.com for the HTML5/CSS3 stuff. In some ways they aren't as detailed as I'd like. I wanted to see what browsers support <input type=number>, which Chrom(e|ium) supports, but FF5 doesn't. However they lump all Form Elements into one category, and tell me that FF has partial support. It would be nicer if they told me how partial, partial was!
Caniuse mostly covers futures stuff, Quirksmode's table cover everything, provide detailed reports on partial compatibility and check extensively for specious behavior at boundaries.
a weekly rate of € 5000? sorry, but seeing that i earn about a quarter of that per month i'm not sure ... i mean, with a weekly rate of 5k i'd work the whole of january (and maybe feb if i'm feeling greedy) and take the rest of the year off.
You might start off that way, but then you'd think "Hmm, if I do an extra few weeks I can buy a nicer car / a fancy new camera / a better computer / go on an expensive holiday / save up more money in case I get too old or too sick to work", and then after a few iterations of that it would be "Hmm, if I work an extra month every year then I can afford a bigger house" a few times. And, since this is consulting income we're talking about, every now and then it would be "Whoa, it was scary not being able to find any work for six months. Just as well I had a little money saved. I'd better work extra hard for a little while to build up my reserves again".
Of course, you might be different. Some people are. But when you have the option of getting a lot more money for a modest amount of extra work, it's really hard not to do it.
A typical rule of thumb while consulting is to charge double what you do if you were employed.
When consulting you need to build up money to pay yourself for time when you're not working, but as a paid employee you'd get 'built in'. e.g. (a) 4 weeks holidays per year, (b) about 1 week illness, (c) 2 weeks(ish) publis holidays per year (d) 1 week (more?) of administration/taxes/form filling. Before you know it you can't work all 52 weeks in the year! And that implies you're working full time. Contractors often have lulls when they have no work. No work, no pay!
That's because you don't have a clue about running a business. What you get as an employee is not what it costs to employ you, and that's not what it costs to do it from your own company.
I'd rather have him not give a discount. Why not let people pay for what they use? How did we get to a state where everybody expects everything to be handed to them for free?
> I'd rather have him not give a discount. Why not let people pay for what they use? How did we get to a state where everybody expects everything to be handed to them for free?
Erm... you may want to note that this is a resource which has always been free and a major contribution to PPK's fame, which in turn is why he can quote rates of 5k€/week.
Sure, but that's no reason for him to update stale content he has no use for for free. Of course the site is a loss leader for the guy's consulting services.
Yes of course, the 'discussion' was about people wanting stuff for free. And my point being that there's no reason for him to provide a 'discount' for the whiners who complain that $5000 is too much for a week of a consultant's work. It's a perfectly normal rate.
I'm kind of surprised that at this point this kind of data isn't in some sort of git repository that people can send pull requests when data needs to be changed.
Advertising makes things shitter. The Louvre could probably replace the frame of the Mona Lisa with some rotating ads, but it would detract from the content. It cheapens it. PPK has spent years building his reputation through Quirksmode - heck, he's one of my most respected sources because I know he has a great sense of pride in his work.
HN people rely for a lot of their income through ads I know, but it doesn't change the feeling (I changed that work from "fact"!) that it detracts from the content. Thanks for your awesome work PPK, I'm donating now!
The majority of people find advertising useful. They buy stuff based on advertising. If they didn't advertisers wouldn't spend advertising money.
Advertising works, providing a service both to the advertiser and the consumer.
I know that's an incredibly unpopular viewpoint within this bubble, but there you go.
If it was the case that most people found advertising 'shit', then you'd see more and more people installing adblock etc. But that hasn't happened. It's still used by a very small minority of users as it has always been. It's sort of like the Opera web browser in that respect.
The conversion rate on advertising is incredibly low: often less than 1%. The remaining 99% see the ads and either ignore them (best case) or get annoyed by them (worst case). Either way, it's content on the page that those 99% don't want to see, and it dilutes the value of the page as a whole.
Most people can tune out adverts they're not interested in extremely well.
When you buy a photography magazine, it might have 20% of the pages covered by advertising. I'd say most people buying the magazine find them useful. Maybe only 1% convert to a sale, but I'd say the majority of people find the adverts useful.
Also, it's not a black and white thing between "content" and "advertising". For example, quite often adverts in digital camera magazines are handy for me because they show me new products or lenses I didn't know about - Those adverts are 'content'.
I'm not going to convince anyone who hates advertising to open their mind a little though, so I'll retire happily to my ad-supported magazines, and ad-supported websites.
Its a necessary evil if you want free content. Btw, click rates are much lower, about 0.05% for a content site.
People also come across thousands of ads that they ignore every day in billboards, shopping windows etc. That's not a legitimate reason to rule out advertising as a revenue option. (On the other hand, claiming that the majority of people find them useful is a bit of a stretch)
I've run AdSense on hundreds of websites and I get click rates between 0.5% and 10%.
Not 0.05% that's insanely low.
Mind you, a lot of those sites (the high end, anyway) are optimized strongly for clicks. The ads show up in the middle of content (as an "interlude") or prominently above the fold.
I used to have this awesome FF addon called Add-Art that overlayed curated visual art in the shapes and sizes of the ads Adblock removed. It was pretty cool. Occasionally it messed up the site's layout but I thought it was worth it. Sadly they didn't update it to FF4 (or now 5). http://add-art.org/
For fun, i made a chrome extension to replace ads with foreign language flashcards, so that i would be learning a language instead of reading ads. Can't say i succeeded ...
Definitely the minority here on HN, on Reddit, and other similar websites, but exit the bubble, and there's a whole world of other people! Some of them even own TVs and buy newspapers :o
Would you be willing to pay an annual subscription for his online "museum" then? Donations are fine, but, to me it is a method that also cheapens the said content. It's a way to say "i believe in my content, but not enough to set a price for it, and asking for donations makes me look like a nice guy (and are untaxable)". </rant>
Great job, Internet!