This site is designed, built, and run by one person (Amanda Viscont). I'm a Ph.D. student finishing up my dissertation this spring, which means that finding time and funding to expand this site beyond how it currently stands isn't easy, and I'm indebted to everyone who has helped me with this project. I've already received an amazing amount of support (code, funding, ideas, morale) along the way (see the credits page). You're already contributing to the site just by being here, and even more so when you add, tag, and rate annotations on the text—thank you!
Enjoyed reading this site or like what it's doing? If you'd like to help even more, there are a couple options...
Share us!
An easy way to support the site is to tell other people about us—whether that's sharing the link on Twitter or Facebook, or giving us a mention, interview, or review in your newspaper or website.
Want to support another way?
Here are some ways to chip in:
- Add more annotations, tags, and votes; answer or ask questions. Don't forget that you can tag other readers' annotations. Tagging is an experimental feature: I'm not sure whether people will use it, but it's the basis of customizing the reading experience to each reader's needs, so the more tags, the better.
- Participate in the research by filling out a short survey about your site experience (preferably before the end of March 2015)
- Review the site: write and share a short review of what you liked, how you used the site, and what needs improvement
- Solve a tech issue: fix one of the tasks marked "out of scope" in the issues queue for this site's repository (these are things that would improve the site, but I don't have time to do them until after I defend my dissertation)
- Purchase some Ulysses swag at the store. I make a small royalty on each product (10% of each product's price), which I'll apply toward the costs described below.
What does this site cost?
The big costs of running this site are paying to let it live on the internet and improving technical aspects of the site:
- web hosting and domain renewal: paying a webhost to serve up this site and owning the domain name (InfiniteUlysses.com)
- user testing: purchasing stickers to incentivize and reward power users of the site (power users—return readers who do a lot of reading and annotating on the site—really help me advance my research on digital reading and how the site affects the experience of Ulysses)
- annotation and human moderation: time taken away from other paying work to add content to the site and keep the community safe and supportive
- automated moderation: affording the Mollom antispam service (which is only free for <=50 legitimate posts a day) to keep the site friendly after it opens to the public
- tech hours: time taken away from other paying work to fix bugs or add new features on the site