Free Your Self

Free Your Self is a simple static website that FLOSS developers and content creators can customize and use to receive donations for their work. It supports many different ways to receive donations. Currently these methods are supported:

• Bitcoin
• Dwolla
• PayPal

Methods which are currently being worked on:

• Amazon Payments
• Google Checkout
• Flattr

The more possible methods of easily and conveniently donating, the higher the chance of getting a donation.

If you have another way in which you would like to receive donations, please let us know! Github pull requests are preferred, but patches sent to duke@leto.net are fine too.

Why?

There many thousands, and possibly millions of FLOSS developers that hack on code for the benefit of everyone, but most FLOSS developers are not great at telling the world what they do and how people can support their work.

Free Your Self aims to fix this problem by providing a dead-simple, easy-to-customize website, which can be hosted for free (as in beer), that makes it easy to tell the world what you do.

Free Your Self is geared towards developers, but anybody can use it. Some examples of other kinds of folks that might like to use Free Your Self:

• Indymedia reporters
• Graphic designers
• Web comic creators
• Nerdy musicians
• Anybody who makes the world a better place by giving out their creations for free.

How To Deploy Free Your Self

Free Your Self is designed to be extremely simple to deploy to Github. To deploy your Free Your Self instance:

• Create a Github account if you don't already have one
• Fork Free Your Self on github
• Modify the _config.yml file and put in your information. Only donation methods that you configure will show up on your Free Your Self website.
• Modify the HTML/Javascript/etc in index.html to tell the world what you do and how to donate.
• Commit your changes and push the new commit to your fork.
• Your new Free Your Self website will show up at https://USER.github.com/freeyourself . It will take about 10 minutes for it to show up the first time, but after that the website will be updated within a few seconds after each push.

This is obviously geared towards FLOSS developers that are comfortable with these kinds of things. A simpler way to setup Free Your Self is in the works. If you have ideas, let us know!

How To Use Free Your Self

Basically, just tell people about it! But here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

• Add a link to the documentation of your project
• Add a link to your email signature
• Write a blog post about why you are so awesome why people should donate to you
• Occasionally send an update to your favorite microblogging service describing how people can send you donations
• Create a QR code which is a link to your donation page. Then you can print it out, make stickers, tshirts, the sky is the limit!

Inspiration

Free Your Self was inspired by Ingy's website http://free.ingy.net . I immediately realized that many, many people could benefit from something like that, but I wanted to make it dead-simple to receive donations as well as being easily configurable.

License

Free Your Self is GPLv3 software, a version of the license can be found in the LICENSE file.