In May, I added the ability to put a PayPal donation button at the bottom of my posts, partly because of an email I got from someone who wasn’t willing to pay for a custom WordPress plugin, but said that if I created it nonetheless:

I bet you’d get some donations. (I always donate for the plugins I use, but maybe I’m the only one?)

I’ve never had the intention of transforming my personal blog into a source of income. My blog’s most important audience are my friends and family, who happen to be the people whose sensibilities I’d worry the most about offending by appearing to ask for money.

However, Google and other search engines have developed a keen interest in several of my posts, sending hundreds of strangers my way every day, especially to those posts which seem to answer peoples’ burning technical questions or provide some blogging functionality in the form of a plugin.

In order to walk that line, I decided that the donation button should only show up on a few of the posts (ones that I’ve categorized as worthy of the “Tip Jar” treatment), so you’ll never see them in the feed or on the homepage. As a nod to my most valued readers, the button will only appear a week after the post was published.

What elicited donations?

May 19 $1 because my dad noticed the button
Aug 13 $5 for Moving from Blogger to WordPress 1.5
Sep 11 $10 for Hiking the Grand Canyon
Sep 13 $5 for my photos in general
Sep 13 $1 Unknown
Oct 23 $10 for Importing Haloscan comments…
Dec 18 $50 for Maintain permalinks…
Dec 28 $5 for monthchunks plugin for WordPress
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Total: $87

Well, I haven’t raised enough to buy a Canon Digital Rebel yet, but hey, I’m still blogging.