Can you guess where I got that title?
I graduated from high school recently, and I’ve already been approved to my dream college. The problem is that college is expensive and in this world, you have to make money by working.
This means I don’t have time to keep developing my freeware projects anymore as I have to focus on paid work instead.
But I love working on ThunderBrowse because it’s something new and I love helping people. I hope that you guys can help me too.
The truth is that I don’t get paid to work on ThunderBrowse. Ads pay out once every eight months and I only get about $100 dollars (ads pay near to nothing [it's such a ripoff]). I also don’t get many donations on behalf of the project.
The thing is that I have lots of great ideas for features to add to ThunderBrowse, many of them that you guys, the community, have suggested that I add. With college approaching, I need to be focusing on paid assignments.
But you can help, and this is where Summer of Funding comes in.
What is Summer of Funding?
ThunderBrowse Popup Window
Summer of Funding is a little of experiment that I want to try with the users of Thunderbird and ThunderBrowse in general.
Users can donate money that will support the continuation of ThunderBrowse development and help me pay part of my college tuition for the first year.
I’m going to set up a milestone system, so that whenever the monetary amount hits a milestone, I’ll start working on a new feature that will greatly improve ThunderBrowse.
I’ve yet to decide how exactly new features will be chosen for each milestone (milestones are every $200 dollars [thus there are 5 milestones]) but most of these features will be ones that are most requested. I might put up a poll to decide what gets worked on next.
3.2.7 will be the last version that will have anything new or big in it as I’ll not be available to work on ThunderBrowse during college. If you really want to get some new and improved features and fixes added, then help me out! 
How can I help?
You can donate to the project. Currently, we accept payment via Paypal (you can pay with your credit card [you do not need an account with paypal to donate]). To donate, simply click on the ChipIn button on the flash widget on the right.
Donations are monitored by ChipIn. ChipIn will just record your name and the amount you want to donate and then take you to PayPal to make your donation. ChipIn makes it easier for me to record who donated how much (for the credits page [more on that later]).
If you don’t want to donate through ChipIn, you can donate directly though PayPal at the donate page.
Read the rest of this entry »
