So much is happening :) (Patreon)

The last couple of days were pretty crazy, and that's all your fault! :) 

While I've been busy finally giving http://octoprint.org a long due overhaul, making it responsive and adding links to this Patreon campaign and PayPal in the process I've also gotten into contact with a couple of people from the industry. So let's see where that gets us!

I've gotten a couple of questions from you with regards to the goal I want to reach here, and I understand that you are probably all eager to know when things will be "safe". The thing is, the whole situation is so fresh that I still have to clarify some legal questions (e.g. the involved taxes) before I can commit to an amount - I don't want to say something and then realize I forgot something important in Germany's tax code and miscalculated. I got an appointment with a tax consultant next week to get some answers, and I hope that will help to clear up some of the huge question marks currently above my head. 

In any case, I'm completely speechless still at the amount you guys have managed to raise in this short amount of time to keep me working like a busy bee on OctoPrint, and I feel completely humbled. Saying "Thank you" doesn't feel enough by far, but still:

Thank you so much!

With all the mailing back and forth and such I haven't been able to put in much actual development work since launching the campaign, but at least I've found the time to backport the "About" dialog from the development branch that will also contain the names of the people from the $20 pledge tier, and I hope you like how that will look in 1.2.11 - I've attached a screenshot to this post.

Speaking about 1.2.11, I hope to get this out of the door ASAP. Currently it contains a couple of bug fixes, but as already mentioned I also want to add some notification mechanism to reach those users that do not follow OctoPrint on social media. I really missed some mechanism like that already when I had that update bug back in version 1.2.7, since there was no way to reach existing users with the information that they'd need a plugin to have the update to 1.2.8 work. Since then I've been wondering whether something like some kind of RSS reader wouldn't be an interesting solution, so that it would be possible to push important notifications (like critical bugs, security issues, etc) or just interesting news (like e.g. the current funding situation ;)) to the existing instances. I'd like to make everything but critical information de-selectable, and I'm also thinking about allowing plugin authors to hook into the same mechanism. What do you think? Good idea? Of course, the last thing I want to do is spam people, but some way of communication beyond depending on people to follow OctoPrint on some social media account and/or read the release notes would certainly help in propagating important information, hence the "multi-channel" idea which allows to unsubscribe from any messages that are not absolutely critical for operation.

Now look at that wall of text, sorry for that :)

Hope you have a pleasant evening, or day, depending on your timezone, and until next time,

Gina