I normally actively avoid posting about anything where money is attached. I’m making an exception here for a project that addresses what I see as a significant (and growing) need in the fandom.
I (along with a team of incredible comods) run an independent archive, the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild. We are one of the only independent archives left, at least in the Tolkien fandom.
We wage a lot of uphill battles to keep our archive open and active, but one of the biggest is the tech side. I’m not an IT pro; I’m a middle-school humanities teacher. I began learning the tech skills to run an archive in 2006 and have been learning ever since. By now, I’ve devoted hundreds if not thousands of hours to learning how to build and run websites. And it’s hard, mostly because it is hard to find information that is written at a level comprehensible by an exhausted middle-school teacher who has a half-hour at the end of her day to puzzle something out. Documentation generally sucks; tutorials often seem to be written at a level just above where I am. My knowledge has a lot of holes as a result, and I sometimes have to give up on something because I can’t find what I need to teach me to do it.
The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development is a Kickstarter project that aims to remedy that by producing materials aimed at teaching web development concepts specifically to a fannish audience and with the goal of supporting an independent fannish web, where fans have the know-how to build their own sites, archives, and other web projects. They are very close to their goal. I made my donation today; I’m hoping we might push them over the finish line.
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