October 16, 2011

Sunday Tech Talk

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I have three questions for the hive mind:

  1. What’s the best service out there for syncing up folders? DropBox? SugarSync? Or, since I’m a Windows-only user and only have a few gigabytes of stuff that I care about, should I just use Microsoft’s free service? Are there nonobvious pitfalls to watch out for?
  2. What’s the best travel site these days? I’m embarrassed to admit that I still creak along with Expedia. What things do other sites do better?
  3. For all you Gmail users: what client do you use? Does everyone just use Gmail’s web client, or is there something better out there?

And finally, a tech success story, just because they seem so rare these days. A couple of weeks ago the power went out here, and when it came back up my email database had been corrupted. After diddling around a bit I gave up and figured I’d take another run at it later in the day. But when I got back from lunch, there was an alert on my computer telling me that my RAID drive had finished repairing itself. Sure enough, I rebooted and everything was fine. So the extra few dollars I spent getting a RAID array when I bought my new box a couple of years ago actually paid off. And it worked completely automatically in the background, just like it’s supposed to. I guess it says something about modern computing that I’m a little shocked at this.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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