Ludum Dare - State of teh Union
Hello Ludum Dare Community!
We’ve got some big news today.
It’s become a bit of a running gag over the years, that Ludum Dare wasn’t hosted at the same place more than twice. Well, we’re keeping with the tradition one more time, but it’s a little different.
Your usual IRC admin’s, mrfun, hamumu, philhassey and myself, with several regulars in the channel actually did something. We got chatting as we usually do, and kicked in to motion a series of events that lead to this.
We’re going home.
A dedicated host explicitly for Ludum Dare is now up and running. We’ve been in contact with Geoff, and have arranged to point ludumdare.com there. It’s almost as if we’re serious this time.
As for what we’re doing, everybody seems to like how the WordPress blog has worked the past 2 compos, so we’ll be setting that up a little more officially. Over the next few days/weeks, we’ll be migrating the blog off the hosting generously provided Phil to it’s dedicated host.
As you can imagine, we each have a long list of goals for the compo and website. It wouldn’t be reasonable at this time to make any big promises of future features, but I think we can all agree this is a good first step. However, we will be making the effort to finally host entries again.
As it stands Phil Hassey is handling the administrative tasks, setting up the blog and migrating things over. Myself (Mike Kasprzak, AKA PoV) am handling the finances. Yeah, we have finances now. No, that doesn’t mean prizes. 
Each of us (including Hamumu and MrFun) will be throwing $30 in to the pot to cover costs. I’ll be pestering everybody for more when the reserves run out, but it’s come to my attention some of you guys might want to help out as well.
Ludum Dare has been all about the community, so I’d like to be as forward as possible about the finances. I’ll be accepting donations on behalf of Ludum Dare’s hosting and other costs (domains, bandwidth accidents). I have a spreadsheet I’ll be managing locally, and I’d like to have a similar public page for you guys. I can’t promise I’ll be updating the public page on time to reflect each months hosting fees, but I’ll make every effort to credit donors as quickly as I can.
If you’d like to make a donation, I’ve set up a PayPal link here:
Donate to Ludum Dare (PayPal)
Please let me know either by e-mail or IRC your alias/handle. Also, when the donor’s page goes live on the new site, feel free to give me a URL so we can link back to you.
If you don’t have PayPal and would like to donate some other way, send an e-mail to mike AT sykhronics DOT com, and let me know what you’re thinking.
We’re starting out on $10 a month shared hosting plan. The hope is that’ll be enough, but we’ll see. Increments of $5 more a month give us all kinds of better possibilities. But rather than go overkill off the bat, and burn the cash reserves right away, we’ll start small and work our way up if we need it.
So that’s what’s going on. If you have any comments or thoughts, do feel free to share them. We’ll keep you posted.
- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)