5MV Secret Project of Doom

Oh yeah. Three and a half years ago, Five-Minute Voyager was a young site. I had been running it for about six months, and annoyingly, I had no better place to put it than Angelfire. That was when my friend Owen offered me free hosting on his server, 3Sygma.com. (Back then, neither of us expected 5MV to grow as big and bandwidth-heavy as it has, but even then it was a very generous offer.) Naturally, I accepted.

For the next three years, Owen was 5MV's best friend. Not only did he host us, he was our unofficial webmonkey -- he helped us with every problem we came across. The little things he did to help keep the site running are too numerous to list.

Now, like me, Owen's a starving student, and it was inevitable that he would eventually have to stop running 3Sygma. He's got other projects, and this one was costing him more all the time with no compensation. But he kept us going as long as he could, and when we found our new home at the Trek Nation, he put in hours of work to help me with the move. Even now that he's no longer hosting us, he still gives me a hand with technical stuff when I need it (he's the one who got the forums registering people again, for example).

Anyway, all this is just to explain that Owen's been a huge help to 5MV, and I've decided we should show him how much we appreciate it. So I'm organizing a sort of "so long and thanks for all the hosting" present. I'm going to send Owen two things: a card and a cheque. The cheque will be the total of whatever contributions we get -- I'm putting in the first $20, and the rest will be from readers. (We've already collected about $50 at the forums, where I first proposed this idea via PM.)

How can you contribute? The easiest way is to use PayPal. I'm registered there under the address zeke at fiveminute dot net (substitute punctuation where applicable). You have to get your own PayPal account to do it, but that's a good idea anyway -- PayPal is useful all over the net these days. However, if you want to pay but don't want to do it that way, email me at the same address and we'll arrange something else. (A couple of forumgoers have sent their contributions by regular mail, for example.)

If you can't or don't want to contribute cash, no problem -- you can still participate. The card I mentioned above is going to contain personal messages from anyone who wants to send one. We're not talking Shakespeare here, more like a yearbook signature -- just a sentence or two saying thank you to Owen for all his help. This is a contribution that anyone can make, and I'm hoping to collect as many as possible. (Note: you don't have to use your real name, and you can do the note thing even if you're already doing the money thing.)

Okay, I think that about covers it. I'd like to send this to Owen by the end of the week, so if you're going to contribute in either of the two ways, please contact me by Thursday or so. By the way, this isn't meant to sound like extortion -- I won't think less of anyone who doesn't participate, and there's no reward for doing so (except that warm fuzzy feeling). This is just something nice you can do for the guy behind the scenes who helps make 5MV happen.

Five-Minute Voyager and subsites are © Colin Hayman.