Yes, That *Is* A New Autostraddle Design You’re Seeing

Hello yes you did notice there’s a new design! Alex and I have been working on it for several months now. Alex did the design, and I wrote the code.

New logo

Alex redesigned the logo!

The old logo

The new logo

New header

The header was completely redesigned and overhauled. We realized the about us “star” menu was confusing, and a bunch of our great content was buried several levels deep in the old menu, and we wanted to make it easier for y’all to find what you’re looking for.

The old menu on desktop

The new menu on desktop

The old menu on mobile

The new menu on mobile

New Fonts

We changed the main fonts from Oswald & Open Sans to Vesper Libre* Merriweather & Montserrat.

* We just swapped it out for Merriweather which is hopefully easier to read! Please let us know if it’s better.

Wider

The site on desktop now maxes out at 1300px wide, instead of 1154px like it did before.

Announcement Bar

The announcement bar is at the top of the page now and dismissible. You can click the X and it’ll go away, and not come back until we change what we want to let you know about!

Feedback?

Do you have thoughts or feelings about the redesign? Bugs in your browser? Please let us know in the comments below! Thank you!

Top 10 Reasons Autostraddle Social is Better Than Other Social Networking Sites

Hey, did you know Autostraddle is more than a website? It’s an impactful force on the world! Yep. That’s right. We do it all, my friend. Beyond A-Camp, beyond open threads and food lists and listicles that touch your heart and also tickle your funny bone, beyond podcasts and personal essays, beyond pretty much all the stuff you love, there is a fervent field waiting for you to roll around in its plentiful bounty. That world is the universe of Autostraddle Social.

Being a member of Autostraddle—whether you’re an A+ member or just a commenter—automatically makes you a part of Autostraddle Social, which is of course abbreviated ASS. It’s totally possible to read, comment on, and even connect with people on Autostraddle without an ASS account, but that’d be a damn shame, because Autostraddle Social is the best.

You heard me. ASS over everything. Pun. Fucking. Intended. And not just because when I’m on ASS, shit like this happens to me:

I’m on a very personal but also professional mission to convert every single person that clicks on this article into a bonafide ASS Addict, except really it’s more like I want you to be my friend and @Reply me in the comments more so I feel less alone in the world. And I’m willing to bet that when you stack up the features and hidden gems that make ASS so wonderful next to the reasons you’re still using Facebook, you’ll realize it’s time for a change.

So come on over, coooommmeee on over baaabyyy, and register on ASS. (Or, log in up there in the right-hand corner and fix your profile up so you can explore the great big online straddleverse right meow.) Maybe start a group. Maybe fill out your profile. Maybe upload an avatar. I dunno, it’s up to you. We’re all on our own journeys and we all make choices in this life. In the meantime, here’s why I’m hellbent on bringing you into our not-so-little clubhouse.

10. Being an ASS Member Makes A Lot of Stuff You Can Do on Autostraddle a Little Easier

I wrote you a poem with a super deep underlying meaning which is to register for Autostraddle Social right now.

Wanna see if anyone replied to your comment on this week’s Friday Open Thread? Can’t remember the clever name you used to identify yourself last time you commented on this website? Wish you could show up as a unique avatar and not a sad, gray, identity-less figure in the night? Wanna submit a meet-up to our events portal?

SOUNDS LIKE YOU NEED AN AUTOSTRADDLE SOCIAL ACCOUNT. Once you’re all logged in and set up, you’ll be able to upload an avatar, set up a username that’s yours forever, and see your comment history in your own activity feed, including replies to comments you make. And even better? If people @Reply you in the comments using your Autostraddle name, you’ll get a notification either by email or when you log in next and check out your profile! (Oh, and you need one for the whole “submitting an event” thing, just so you know. I’m not letting you off the hook here.)

9. We’re Not Harvesting Your Data

Unlike Facebook, we don’t structure our profile format to cater to advertisers. You will not see weirdly targeted ads based on the information you put in your ASS profile showing up when you’re perusing our website, nor will you start getting unsolicited emails from marketers (or even from us, for that matter) when you sign up. Plus, if you’re super private like that, you can set up an extremely bare profile and still be a fully loved member of this community! Have it your way, not Facebook’s. Come be a human in a community instead of just another response to what’s really a horribly disguised marketing survey!

8. When You Log On, You’re Supporting an Indie Queer Business That Loves You Back

We just get you.

Autostraddle Social was built by and for, well, Autostraddle. We love you guys, in case you couldn’t tell, and having a social media component on this website — versus setting up a forum or just letting y’all live your lives in the comments of our articles — was a decision we made because we wanted to make your Autostraddle experience even better. When you use ASS to connect with each other and communicate with the queer world at-large, you’re engaging with something designed with your needs and wants in mind — and you’re supporting the incredible geniuses who built you this world in the first place.

7. ASS Puts The Straddleverse At Your Fingertips

In one click I just learned so much about everyone’s lives and also emotional states, it was amazing, you should try it.

Here’s just a sampling of the things you can do with your ASS account: View the recent activity of your friends and favorite users, send private messages to the person you’ve been commenting back-and-forth with all night to flirt with them all cute like, see and interact with other users’ statuses and posts in groups, and find out more about how to connect with people IRL or elsewhere on the Internet. If you’ve come here for friends, eternal love, or to find the one other person like you on this planet, you’re in luck, because we’ve got what you need.

Also, with the click of a button you can search every member and look at them at-a-glance so basically, the entire straddleverse is your oyster.

You are not alone, y’all.

6. You and Your Safety Come First Here

In addition to being queer-owned, -designed, and -operated, Autostraddle Social is also run by the same ragtag team of loving humans that keeps the main website going every day. When you submit reports about users, flag inappropriate content, or reach out to our tech team with concerns and questions, you’re not being assigned a ticket number and handled via an automatic response. Instead, your message is received by a human being (again, who loves you) who will actually take the time to investigate your situation, respond to your inquiries, and reassure you about your life as needed.

Plus, we’ve got super advanced privacy settings — literally every single piece of information you share on your profile has a unique security setting, so you could even opt to show your friends everything and strangers nothing but your name and gender, if that’s what floats your boat. Or, you could go really incognito and maintain an aire of mystery. Seriously, whatever suits you and makes you feel safe is what we’re striving for here.

5. The First Rule of Autostraddle Social Is That There Are No Rules on Autostraddle Social

Anna is literally living the dream right now.

Looking to find a social network where you don’t have to use your “real name?” (Whatever that means.) Wanna set up shop somewhere where your “relationship status” field is actually an accurate reflection of your queer, polyamorous heart? Seeking out a social media platform where your entire identity isn’t forced into exclusive categories?

Welcome home.

4. Using ASS Will Help You Unplug A Little Without Even Trying

I saw these notifications because I was emotionally prepared to, and not a second before, and I feel good about it.

If you’re burnt out from responding to Facebook group threads because they interrupt your day by blowing up your phone, exhausted from overloading on Twitter notifications you don’t even remember opting into, and tired of seeing those stressful badges on all your apps reminding you a zillion people require your attention, get ready for some relief. You can be as connected to ASS as you want — whether that means setting up email notifications for every damn thing or just direct messages and replies, installing an Autostraddle sorta-app on your phone to peruse at your will, or just stopping in to check out your new messages and comments when you’re feeling game to do so on your desktop. Whoever said you could have it all didn’t know what it was like to join a ton of groups on ASS and never worry, not even once, that it meant you’d be receiving a flurry of annoying updates and notifications every single minute for the rest of your entire life.

NOTE: I’m aware, by the way, that a lot of you wish we did have a push notification system on ASS. While we’re not able to offer that to you, I’m hoping my perspective on this situation will win you over heart and soul. And, to be honest, as someone who gets ASS email notifications about like, every single thing that happens w/r/t my ASS profile, I gotta say, it’s a close second! Like, just look at this. LOOK AT THIS THING OF BEAUTY.

Don’t want this? YOU DON’T HAVE TO HAVE IT. Look good to you? THEN LIVE YOUR DREAMS, KITTENS.

3. ASS Makes It Possible For You to Connect With Commenters, Staff Members, A-Campers, Other Superstars

THIS COULD BE YOU

Whether you’re looking to connect with some of our most prolific and awesome commenters or just searching for the girl you met at that Autostraddle meet-up last night, chances are what unites them is a membership on this website. In fact, considering how differently everyone uses social media — with approximately half of the world hating Facebook, a quarter not understanding what Twitter is, etc. — it’s maybe even more likely that the people from your extended Straddleverse are here than there.

2. …And ASS Groups Help You Connect With Like-Minded Folks You Might Not Have Met Otherwise

This was a really affirming ASS group experience for me, just saying

Y’all fucking love groups. Like, holy cow! I can’t even deal with it. Whenever I go to A-Camp, a meet-up, or even really down the street I meet someone who wants to start a Facebook group to corral me and the other Autostraddlers who share my vibe. But guess what? You don’t need to be part of Mark Zuckerberg’s machine to do that! Starting an ASS group will help you connect with other readers, A-Campers, and meet-up regulars alike who share your interest in, say, feminism, Tumblr, cats, or even Crystal’s workout plan. Our groups, like the aforementioned Facebook groups you hold close to your heart and have customizable privacy settings, let you comment on and favorite other people’s posts — but unlike groups anywhere else on the Internet, they’re populated only by the best people alive: Autostraddle readers, commenters, and community members.

1. QUEERMOS ONLY.

A friend request list I can believe in because it doesn’t include anyone I secretly wish I could avoid

Which brings me, actually, to my most important point about ASS. Above all, what we offer you is being part of a smaller, closer-knit, and more awesome community online than the Internet at-large. And what that means is that ASS is populated by people like you: queermos who love this website, share a collective political consciousness trending toward common sense, care about LGBT issues but also love crafts and movies, and can maybe even make a mean chili. And ASS, in turn, isn’t populated by, say, your uncle, estranged father, awkward classmates, work “friends,” and former elementary school teachers. Just you, me, and the rest of our family. Sounds good? Yeah, I know it doesn’t. ‘Cause it sounds FUCKING AWESOME.

OK, Now Go Set Up Your ASS Profile!

Oh, and let’s be friends. Because I love you, as previously stated.

What We Comment About When We Comment About Commenting

by riese but also some of this is by laneia

It’s Tell Us Everything Week on Autostraddle!

“It started as a little whisper last year. Are people commenting on your posts anymore?” Grace Bonney wrote in 2014 on Design*Sponge’s State of the Blog Union. “And then those whispers found other whispers from trusted blogging friends to join. Oh they’re not? Yeah, mine either. It’s like people just stopped talking.”  

Even on sites with strong readerships and increasing traffic, a distinct shift was happening in these previously thriving comment sections. The shift was, basically, that people weren’t engaging how they used to. In the old days, comments were the sole location for discussing a blog’s posts, but social media has changed all that. Instead of discussing content on the website itself, users could link to it on a variety of social media platforms to discuss with their own friends and family. “Instead of coming to hang out at our houses, they were dropping by quickly, taking a few key pieces with them and leaving to comment and discuss those things in their own living rooms,” wrote Bonney.

This wasn’t necessarily an inherently negative shift for the readers, but it was a tough shift for writers to swallow. When I started blogging in 2006, I responded to every single comment left on my blog, and when we launched Autostraddle in 2009, I asked our writers to do the same. One of the many reasons I tapped Laneia to help me build this website is because she had extensive community-building experience from her own blog and moderating forums for The Planet Podcast. From Day One, we wanted it to be clear that we weren’t just here to talk AT you, we were here to talk WITH you, because that’s part of what we love about the internet to begin with. Sure, we had our fair share of conflicts, ignorant asshats and flame wars, but most of the time our comment section was full of empathy, support, and education.

We always cite what Autostraddle has accomplished when we talk about the kind of online community we want to build around our books. They are a site with a much larger, broader scope, but we live in awe of the vibrant health of their comments and forums — people treat each other with such respect and care, without being sanitized or sycophantic.
– Emily Gould of Emily Books

Needless to say, by the end of 2013, when our comment counts were lowering and our traffic was increasing, we weren’t quite ready to let go. We still aren’t, and we know you’re not either.

The Big Shift

We disagree

Other sites, less reliant on or engaged with their community, adapted quickly to this change. Sites like Popular Science and The Week shut down their comment section, the latter because comment sections were too often hijacked by trolls. So did Re/Code, Reuters and Mic, who are focusing instead on social media comments. Everyday Feminism actively hosts all their conversations on Facebook and doesn’t allow on-site comments.

The possibility of an ideal comment ecosystem existing was also revealing itself to be a fallacy. Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ commenters on The Atlantic were famous for their genuinely progressive dialogue, but even Coates is now considering shutting down his comments altogether. “If there’s a lesson to be taken away from the story of the [Coates’ blog] Horde, it might be—depressingly—that trying to build a comment section that truly adds value to a writer’s work will inevitably become more trouble than it’s worth,” wrote Eva Holland on Longreads. This summer, The Verge shut down comments to give its writers a break from negativity. The New York Times recently decided to only enable comments on select articles to ensure they had suitable moderation resources to handle it. Slate is currently hosting a conversation on whether or not they should kill their comment sections, which are often overrun with negativity.

“Small sites are too poor to pay human moderators, and large sites have too great a volume of comments for human moderators to keep up with,” wrote Slate’s Senior Technology Editor Will Oremus. “The result is that moderation across the Web tends to be insufficient at best and nonexistent at worst.”

That moderation problem applies here, too. We don’t have dedicated moderators — almost every single comment that isn’t spammy or from a blocked user goes up without approval — but we do have a large engaged team of writers and we do have a increasingly detailed comment policy and we do have you. As a community, y’all self-moderate and step in when another reader is out of their depth or think reverse racism exists. You’ve helped steer derailed conversations back on track, while continuing to educate and support each other. Comments on Autostraddle aren’t always sunshine and hand-holding, obviously. Sometimes our comment section can get unpleasant: callout culture so toxic it’s often a parody of itself and people become unwilling to see the humanity in each other. When that happens, it can get harder to feel excited and engaged with a community that might appear to only speak up when they’re complaining or attacking other commenters. (Slate has the same experience.)

But even with these rare displays of callout culture, our comment section remains the most civil and empathetic we’ve seen anywhere on the internet.

So where does this leave us? A site that prided itself on a thriving, supportive commenting community, a site that aims to build community for its own sake as much as it does to inform and entertain its readers?

At first, we felt immune to the shift due to the specific nature of a queer audience: many of our readers weren’t out or else just didn’t feel comfortable discussing queer stuff on platforms accessible to their social network, or didn’t have queer people to talk to on social media. Requiring commenters to login with Facebook or Google Plus was never an option for us. We were, in fact, the first online magazine to launch a companion Tumblr, and our Tumblr community was strong and vast, but we didn’t think much about Facebook or Twitter. Until we had to, that is.

The Facebook Effect

Over the past two years, websites have became increasingly reliant on Facebook for traffic as many internet users began replacing “visiting the homepage” with “waiting to see what pops up on my Facebook news feed.” This has enormous and incredibly dangerous implications for the future of online media, but that’s an entirely different essay I won’t subject you to today.

Mainstream sites like Buzzfeed or HuffPo dominate the Facebook game, and their coverage of LGBTQ issues sometimes feels “safer” to share than the same stories from unapologetically indie queer sites like ours. Autostraddle readers who began using Facebook as a news feed were, by design, only being made aware of the most controversial or vapid posts we published, as whether or not something shows up in your feed is based on how much Facebook engagement, comments, likes and shares the post garners. We were baffled by readers claiming we had become a site solely for bisexual women when maybe two out of every fifty posts were about bisexual women and we were consistently being asked by bisexual women for more non-monosexual content — until we realized that if you’re only reading AS articles that show up on your Facebook feed, it could very well seem that way.

Regulars like Drawn to Comics and Things I Read That I Love are rarely discussed, liked, or shared on Facebook, despite having passionate and loyal on-site readerships. Personal essays and advice posts that provide the intimate experience our readers love us for often aren’t particularly ripe for sharing, either. The controversial or vapid posts usually also gather the most incendiary and obtuse comments, so for readers getting all their Autostraddle from Facebook, Autostraddle likely seemed like a burning bush fanning the flames of its ongoing war. Also: a semi-reliable source of information on Kristen Stewart’s romantic life.

This past fall, we surrendered to Mark Zuckerberg’s Higher Power and started “working on” our Facebook presence to ensure we kept our readers reading and aware of everything we published. Having good social media is just as important as having good content these days, and Heather and Carmen hit the ground running to ensure that we did, and we do. The more “engagements” (likes, shares, etc) we get with our posts on Facebook, the more people see those posts in their feed.

All this extra time spent on Facebook enabled us to witness another phenomenon at work: our comment sections were becoming 1-D victims of our 3-D success.

The Third Wheel?

As aforementioned, we felt blissfully immune to this evolution because of our queerness. Even when Facebook swallowed other websites’ comment sections, ours stood strong as the only place most of you had to connect with other queers on issues and stories that mattered to you. Then A-Camp started and the A-Camp Unofficial Facebook Social Group was born. Autostraddle meet-up groups started popping up all over the world with companion Facebook groups, as did specialized Facebook groups for different identities. Suddenly, Autostraddle wasn’t the only place you could connect online with other Autostraddlers, let alone other queers. These groups and networks have been an undeniably important and amazing development for our community (especially the QTPOC Speakeasy), but now we have to figure out how to maintain both while maintaining our sanity and on-site camaraderie.

This situation reached its peak after this past A-Camp, which, according to feedback surveys, was our most well-reviewed and beloved A-Camp yet. Usually our post-camp Open Thread gets 100 comments in its first few hours, but that’s been changing gradually over the years. This June, while the post-camp Open Thread languished in the double-digits, my Facebook feed was blowing up with heartwarming comments and testimonies from campers about their experiences. It made me sad, thinking about all the prospective campers who weren’t hearing the amazing stories I was reading on Facebook — not just the day that post went up, but ever.  Even though commenting had gone up site-wide since we first noticed the decline, we saw in action how on some posts, social media community replaced site community. It also made me sad because, well, hanging out on Autostraddle is fun and hanging out on Facebook can be a little, um, stressful? WE MISSED YOU.

Facebook is a giant corporation owned by a cis straight white man that makes money by offering advertisers dirt-cheap access to millions of tightly-targeted customers. We should all be wary of moving our lives entirely to this platform, or any social media platform!  Furthermore, not everybody has Facebook. Twitter conversations are great, but if a topic doesn’t have a hashtag, millions of readers (some who won’t even seek out the topic for several more years because they’re too young to care right now ) will completely miss out on the conversation forever.

“Twitter and Facebook have their merits, but they’re very poor venues for substantive, ongoing, multiperson discussions that are tied to a single, specific article or set of ideas. The ideal venue for that specific sort of conversation remains the comment section of the article itself.”
– Will Oremus, Senior Technology Editor, Slate.com

Why We’ve Dedicated This Week To Focusing on Comments and Community

Other web-writers we encounter are shocked we still read — let alone engage with — our commenters, but to us the comments are an essential element of the community we’re not looking to sacrifice. Social media is incredibly important to us, but it doesn’t replace our on-site community, and we don’t have the financial resources to hire anybody dedicated solely to social media like literally every other site this size does. So we want to engage on-site conversation and make connections here, in this space. Period.

Last year our traffic exploded as we became the world’s most popular website for queer women, but comments were lower than ever. This year, we disabled the login-only function and got our staff engaged in turning the comment culture train around, and the past few months have been going really well. But we think we could do EVEN BETTER.

Welcome To Our Queer Internet Commune

We’ve talked about how commenting culture has changed all over the internet and how connecting to other queers through social media has dimmed on-site discourse, but we also need to talk about commenting culture in general, and how many readers — including our own staff! — have become scared to comment, period. We have interview subjects request extensive edits to what’s supposed to be an off-the-cuff interview in fear they could be misread and/or taken out of context and swiftly declared offensive.

Laneia and Riese have been watching queer people talk to each other on the internet for almost a decade, beginning with our own blogs and then moving on to Autostraddle over six years ago, and we consider ourselves experts at this point. Over the past several years, we have seen an obvious uptick in the times that we’ve seen you cut each other down, assume bad faith, pile on people with less dexterity in social justice language and lose your damn minds over grey areas without clearcut solutions. We witness ourselves get rude and angry, too, and spend three hours in a comment fight instead of writing.

But more importantly — more telling of who you and we really are — we’ve seen you build entire communities around TV shows, support each other in coming out, make IRL friends and even find your future wives through the wonders of commenting. It’s been legitimately amazing. You’ve inspired people and changed their lives with your dedication to making this work. You’ve trusted each other, assumed good faith, reached out to newcomers, respectfully navigated grey areas that didn’t always come with obvious rights or wrongs, and generally changed the whole world, really. You’ve found a way to disagree with somebody while also making everybody laugh. We get emails all the time from readers who didn’t know anything about [trans issues, race issues, queer politics beyond marriage equality] and were grateful for the education.

We feel confident, after ten years of total immersion in internet dialogue, with stating the following: productive conversations only happen when we assume good faith and treat each other with the patience and kindness that we devote to conversations with our friends and others we know and respect. 

We know in our hearts that this space is different, and that this community is uniquely capable of navigating grey areas and keeping the space accessible to all types of readers, because we’ve seen you do it! Once upon a time, we were all ignorant and naive, unsure of our own identities and patient with one another’s self-discovery. Those of us with this knowledge are now often in the majority, but it’s on us to share — not flaunt — that knowledge. Even if your politics are sound, the way you express those politics to others can end up replicating the very power structures we all want to dismantle, endorsing righteousness and performance above genuine dialogue. We want Autostraddle to keep being a place that invites more commenting, more engagement, more people telling their stories and listening to others.

We don’t believe that everything can be self-taught. Sometimes you can’t just Google something. Sometimes you’d rather get an education from somebody you trust, and not the first Tumblr that pops up. A single mother who works two jobs to support her family and never went to college doesn’t necessarily have the time to teach herself queer theory before jumping into a community like ours. Teenagers in small towns without any queer resources and no access to feminist literature come here knowing literally nothing, and that’s actually totally okay. We have readers who are the only queer person of color in their town, the only trans woman in their town, the only gay in the village, who desperately need a safe space to be themselves. We have readers who aren’t fluent in academia and we also have a lot of readers who aren’t fluent in English, either. We have readers who have the resources but still mess up sometimes and that is also okay.

We’re here to say that we will absolutely forgive those of us who are still learning — about the world and also themselves, their place in it. We believe that sometimes it is up to us, and to you, to assume good faith when it makes sense, and to educate people when we can. We want to intentionally leave room for the grey areas that don’t have obvious rights and wrongs, because that’s where growth happens. When we respectfully engage in conversations and we take on the role of being someone else’s sounding board and help them hash out their understanding of various topics and experiences, we necessarily affect change.

Many of you have your own communities where everybody is identified by name and face and nobody is anonymous — a class, a closed Facebook group, a book club — where you’ve been able to flex newfound muscles and try out your ideas; where people have given you the space to fuck up, try again, get it wrong before you get it right. You have family and friends who give you the benefit of the doubt, and you give it to them, and y’all help each other figure out the hard stuff. But even more of you do not have that community. A comment section filled with nitpicking and accusations of bad faith and language policing is unwelcoming and intimidating. Callout culture, pile-ons, and basic rudeness to each other and to writers can and will drive readers and writers away, people who are still learning and don’t have a community to be their sounding board and help them figure out the hard stuff. That’s why Autostraddle is different, and why it must continue to be accessible to as many levels of education and understanding as possible. We believe that if you can, if you have it in you, you should try to be that community for someone who needs it.

And fuck it, like, we honestly believe in kindness.

Most importantly — Commenting is feedback

I've only ever written for one website that didn't have comments and it felt like I was whispering to myself in the wilderness.

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) September 24, 2013

Without your feedback or affirmation on our posts, we have no idea what you like! We have a few posts each day that get a lot of traffic, but a lot more that don’t. We publish those ’cause we think you might like them, ’cause we wanna talk about them, or ’cause we think the world needs them.

We often cancel columns only to suddenly hear that it was your favorite and you will die without it — you’ve gotta let us know before we get to that point, y’all! When nobody’s talking to our writers, our writers lose their desire to write. Yes, we’re getting paid, but not as much as we deserve, and regardless, our writers are here for more than a paycheck, they’re here for connection. Even an “I like this” can change everything for a writer. When we publish work by new underrepresented voices, a supportive comment section can be the difference between whether or not we ever hear from that writer again. Recaps, in particular, are a time-consuming drain, and without the immediate gratification of conversation with our readers, people are reluctant to write them. (Case in point: The Fosters.) Y’all if you want Gabby to recap Empire you have to comment more on her OITNB recaps, just saying.

So.

Thank you! Thank you for every minute you’ve spent helping someone else grasp a concept in the comments, thank you for letting us know when we’ve mattered to you. Thank you for sharing our words on social media and going to meet-ups and coming to camp. Thank you for sharing yourself here and helping to make this space safe for other people to try themselves on. Please, keep it up.

We’re leveling with you: this is what we came here for. We’re here for the community and the communication. We’re here for the conversation. We don’t ever, ever want to whisper to ourselves. We came here to fucking talk, to fucking listen, and think and then talk and listen some more. We can’t grow as a community without conversations and feedback, and we can’t have those conversations without kindness and assumptions of good faith.

So, this week we’re really laying it on thick — there’s even a contest and we’re whipping up some resources to expedite the “Google it” process.

This is where you prove everyone else wrong and us right. You damn the man and save the comments! You save the conversations and the empire — the empire you helped build to begin with.

It’s Tell Us Everything Week on Autostraddle!

Hey, you. Yes, you there. With the hair thing going on? And the nice shirt. How do you get your skin so smooth?

LISTEN UP! I’ve got a very special announcement for each and every one of you and you’re not gonna wanna miss it. Okay, ready? Okay. Ahem.

IT’S TELL US EVERYTHING WEEK AT AUTOSTRADDLE DOT COM!

What the F*ck is Tell Us Everything Week?

Here’s the situation. We’re all madly in love with you, and especially with what you add to our own lives by being here, right here, in this space with us online, every day. We love your comments, your banter, your avatars, your cute “About Me” sections in your Autostraddle member profiles… the list goes on. We make things for you and we love talking to you about them. We wanna hear even more of what you have to say!

But commenting online has evolved quite a bit over the last few years and a lot of websites are shutting down comment sections altogether, moving the bulk of their social energy into social media, or only selectively opening posts to reader feedback. That’s not our style, though. Your words have been as important to us as our words since we leaped onto this ship in the first place. We’re gonna talk more about that in a different post later this week, but in the interest of getting to the point:

And thus, Tell Us Everything week was born.

We’re dedicating a whole week of content – starting right here, right now, with this post – to you. We’re gonna talk Internet culture, share stories about our experiences in the Straddleverse, and maybe even serenade you in the moonlight. We’re also gonna talk about our commenting culture in general, and what we’ve observed works best when it comes to making Autostraddle a place that feels comfortable and safe to the broad spectrum of readers we attract — from that Women’s Studies PhD in Northampton who’s got a wife and two dogs to the mother-of-two in St. Louis nervous to leave her husband for a life only glimpsed via The L Word to the radical activist in Oakland who recently came out as transgender to the 16-year-old in rural Mississippi who has to read Autostraddle in secret and has no idea what “demisexual” means.

Everything we do here at Autostraddle is about our readers — the people just like you who click our links on social media, leave comments in the night on our recaps, and support our work endlessly, and support each other.

To sweeten the deal, though, we’re also throwing in some prizes for the most devoted and active amongst you. Because you’re our heart and soul and you deserve A+ memberships and Autostraddle merch!

So, How Do I Win?

Here’s how this whole shebang is going down. In order to win a prize during Tell Us Everything week, you just need to do two things: create an Autostraddle member account, and leave as many comments on this website as possible in the next seven days. 

Even if all your comment says is “thank you for this piece” or “I like this” or “wow.” (Seriously on the “wow.” I’d take a “wow” any day), we’re into it. We also really like to know where you are with this — whatever this is, whatever we’re talking about. What’s it like for you? Can you reach out to another commenter to further their conversation? You add to this community, you bring it to life, you help steer the boat. There’s nothing more rewarding for us than sparking conversation, watching y’all get to know each other, and fostering this beautiful and kind community for all of you wonderful humans across the world who want and need it.

So this week, while we’re spilling our guts about how much we love you, we wanna hear from you, too! Hence the name of the week, you guys. We want you to tell us everything. We wanna know if our articles rip your heart open or sew them shut. We wanna see pictures when you attempt to cook our recipes or make the DIY crafts we walk you through. Really, we just wanna know how you’re doing and how you’re feeling today and, like I said, how you get your hair so shiny.

The more comments you leave this week, the more likely you’ll be to win bigger and better prizes. I’ll be drawing the winners (on camera!) and posting the video on Thursday, July 16. If you wanna participate in the contest, you also have to comment on this very post — that’s how we’ll know who to track this week. (But it won’t count towards your total!)

What Are The Prizes?

Here they are, cap’n: you can pick from any of the options below if you win for your tier. And just in case you were wondering, there are more than one of some of these prize packages available. THE ODDS ARE EVER IN YOUR FAVOR, Y’ALL.

TIER 1: Leave 5+ Comments This Week

• Your choice of one of the following: Better Together Issue #1 (OMG I’m GAY), Better Together Issue #2 (I Broke Up Like This), Vapid Fluff Tote Bag, A-Camp hoodie, Liquor in the Front Flask, Safe Space Pencil Case, three Rory stickers or three You Do You stickers or a You Do You pin
• One-year A+ Bronze Membership (for you or a friend)

TIER 2: Leave 10+ Comments This Week

• Your choice of any of the merch listed in Tier 1 OR Better Together Issue #3 (Queer Sultry Summer), or any t-shirt or tank top in the Autostraddle store.
• One-year A+ Silver Membership  (for you or a friend)

TIER 3: Leave 15+ Comments This Week

A “Thank You” postcard from the Senior Editors and the following:

• Your choice of any merch item in the Autostraddle Store
• One-year A+ Gold Membership (for you or a friend)

Welcome To The New Improved Autostraddle!

Hello Autostraddle! Welcome to the first day of the rest of our lives together! You may have noticed that things look a little different around here, and I’m sure you have lots of feelings about it, such as “I LOVE THIS!” or “WAY TO RUIN MY FAVORITE WEBSITE, ASSHATS!” Thus, our Tech Director Cee and our Design Director Alex are here to explain themselves and give you a little peek behind the scenes of our brand new world.

Cee: Tech Director

Hi everyone!

Cee here with this massive project’s technical report. Back when the website was really broken (remember all those 503 errors every day?), we launched an indiegogo campaign to fix the website’s code so that it worked.  While we were in there, we figured we’d redesign it, to bring it up to date and fix some design issues.

A few months into the project my friend Mike and I did a lot of talking about scaling large WordPress apps like Autostraddle for the kind of traffic we get. He suggested an ideal server setup which would mean getting us off of a “service” hosting and into self-hosting – building the servers ourselves and maintaining them. I figured we had nothing to lose, so around the beginning of January last year we started building the servers and testing the load. After a month or so of that, and lots of various load testing, we realized we were in a much better place on the new servers than where we were hosting (and spending a LOT of money monthly). We were finally ready to move the site, and I moved everything over on Valentine’s Day this year. There was a shaky week where we needed to reconfigure and tweak some settings, but after that the site has been running flawlessly. We’ve had almost 100% uptime for the past nine months. So, by quickly putting out the original fires if you will, we were able to relax and take our time with the redesign.

The redesign is one of the most complicated WordPress themes I’ve built to date, with over 4200 lines of code in the stylesheet alone. I’m proud of some of the more fun functionality we have here – the responsive code, masonry (how the boxes quickly scramble to get to their spots after the window is resized), the click navigation and how the navigation changes from large screen to mobile on resize while still being easily editable by Riese from the WordPress backend. I’m also really loving how the community section (BuddyPress) works finally and looks so much nicer and finally makes sense to me. I’ve added some new features there too – you can now search for local or like-minded Autostraddlers. Look for the “toggle search form” button in the Autostraddle Members page. You can now upload avatars directly to Autostraddle instead of having to use Gravatar (but that option is still there). Avatars are nice and big now, so you can actually see them. And finally, groups now work properly, and you can upload a photo for them.

This redesign has been really fun and interesting for me technically. Alex is a great designer and she’s really pushed me to come up with creative code solutions for her designs. I want to thank all of the supporters personally for helping us, and allowing Autostraddle to hire me. This has been a great project and I’m looking forward to the future!

Alex: Design Director

Whew! We’re finally here! WE MADE IT!

First, I’d like to personally apologize for the delay. The scope of the project was enormous for two people (one designer, one developer) and I’m guilty of optimistic deadlines. What can I say, this was a learning experience – a good one! The only person happier about this launch other than Cee is me.

Good design is obvious.
Great design is transparent.

I must have redesigned the redesign a full eight different times with tons of iterations for each. With each version, I found that I wasn’t adding more but I was taking away because I over-designed and over-thought it in the beginning.

One of the first iterations/concepts of the new redesign, made with construction paper!

Where we’ve ended up is a result of a long process involving many people and much feedback, and but I’m confident that we’ve achieved the goals we set out to achieve.

Responsive Design
Autostraddle is now responsive, which means you can re-size your browser window and the content will adjust accordingly. Go ahead, give it a whirl! This makes our website viewable on many different devices, all at once. Pretty nifty if you ask me. The “boxy” layout we picked from the get-go was especially mobile-friendly.

Every element sits in it’s own “module” because this design best lends itself to a responsive layout. You don’t need to download a separate app — visiting our website on your device is as easy as typing in our URL. You can also save Autostraddle.com to your home screen for easy accessibility.

Navigation
Finding what you’re looking for should be as easy as ever now that we have brand new navigation and different ways to access content around our site. For example, every article is labeled with one (or more) category and tags. Click any of these and you’re brought to a page containing a feed of articles containing that category or tag.

Also like Cee mentioned above, the search function now works. So you should be able to find anything you’re looking for and if you can’t, I want to know about it!

Comments
Comment replies are hidden and you can make them visible by clicking the “Show Replies” button.

This button appears only when there are replies within that comment thread, which we think helps keep the comments more organized by thread discussion.

Showcasing Our Awesome Authors
We believe a big part of the experience here is the accessibility to our authors and writers. These guys do amazing work and they thrive off of you guys and your feedback. So we’ve added a few things in order to give our writers more real estate on the site and more ways for you to get to know them better:

• Better author profiles, which you can access by clicking the name of the writer. Here, check out Vanessa’s profile as an example!
• A short bio of the author follows every article
• Authors are designated differently in the comment section of their articles by a teal circle around their photo

You Should Go
We get a lot of requests to talk about, announce, or feature events and it became clear to us that we needed to offer an event-only space where we can recommend events that y’all should go to. This space is that box you see in the sidebar called “You Should Go”.

Let Us Know When You Like an Article
Let’s say hypothetically that you read an article on Autostraddle and you really like it and you want to let us know that you like it? Well, now we have a button for that! (But as always, it’s your comments that really mean the most to us)

Click that thumbs up button if you like the article, and we can get a much better picture of what you guys like without having to solely rely on comments. It’s another way for us to connect with you on content so we can continue to create shit you like!

WTF is That Star in My Nav Bar?
That star you see up in that teal bar at the top of your screen is where we keep all the stuff specific to the Autostraddle universe!

This includes links to: our social media outlets, information about us, the meet the team page, our brand new fancy event site, and well, you get the idea.

We’ll also be adding a “Feature Article” section post-launch.

We know that redesigns can be hard to get used to at first, but we really think you’re gonna like this. We’ll eventually be going to sleep, of course, as we are wont to do, but will be around tomorrow to chat with you about the new site in the comments!

Autostraddle Makes Refinery29’s “24 Best Websites For Women”

Vanessa’s Team Pick:

We’re big fans of Refinery29, “the cornerstone of fashion, beauty, and shopping for a new generation” and a site that has recently evolved from a fashion website to a lifestyle platform (Inc. magazine ranked it second among the 100 fastest growing media companies!), so we’re super honored to be featured in their list of the 24 Best Websites For Women (Our Version!).

Refinery29 news editor Lexi Nisita explained that the R29 list was created as a counterpoint to Forbes‘ The 100 Best Websites For Women, 2013, which was published last week but didn’t include all the popular, influential, smart, important women’s websites (run by and for women) that we’re all fans of. We love that Refinery29 took the time to put together a response, and we love what they have to say about us, too:

Though it defines itself as a website for lesbian, queer, and bisexual women, we know plenty of straight chicks who experimented with Autostraddle in college — and they’re still regular readers today.

We strongly encourage you to head over to Refinery29 and check out the other sites that made their impeccably curated cut. Some of our favorites are on there, like Bust, io9, and The Toast, and we’re excited to add some new titles to our RSS feeds too. We’re thrilled to be listed in such good company!

The Big Autostraddle Rebuild & Redesign Update: The Future Is Bright

Wow it seems like just yesterday that y’all were generously tossing money all over us but it wasn’t just yesterday, it was six weeks ago, which means it’s time for an UPDATE. As you’re probably aware, A-Camp 2.0 happened in September, as did a lot of other Life Events like moving and starting school and family visits, but we’re all working really hard and feel very warm-hearted and optimistic about the future!

So, as Marvin Gaye might wonder, what’s going on?

The past month has been dedicated mostly to fulfilling fundraiser perks, re-organizing in-house processes and redesign planning, which includes stakeholder interviews, timeline development, lots of meetings and an agreement on “the plan.”

Meredydd, who helped us in the past with our reader surveys and has worked at A-Camp, has jumped on board as a project planner, overseeing the timeline development, conducting stakeholder interviews and generally keeping the team on task. She’s like a little angel from a magical land in the clouds where everybody is super-organized and can predict thunderstorms before they happen.

Cee Webster, the Tech Director you helped us hire, has already started helping out fixing some smaller things that don’t endanger site load time, like fixing the search function and re-organizing our bizarre email system. As she gets started on the nuts and bolts of building the new site and figuring out our optimal server situation, she’s looking for a new intern, drinking lots of coffee and reminding us frequently that building something of this size is a huge project that takes a long time!

cee is looking towards the future

The next stage is Creative Development, estimated to last until December 2012, which will include things like building the wireframe and creative mock-ups and the requisite meetings, feedback, revisions and approvals about those things too.

The Building Phase will likely begin in November 2012 and likely last until March of 2013, maybe longer. As well as the obvious “building” part of the building phase, this phase will include testing (which will include YOU!) for usability, various quality assurance measures.

We’re tentatively hoping to launch the new site by May 2013, and follow that up with continued iteration and optimization. Projects like this are unpredictable, though, so we can’t make any promises but we will keep you abreast of changes. We’ll be setting up a twitter account to inform you of progress and solicit feedback from supporters about the site as we move forward!

In the meantime, extra features (sidebar widgets, in particular) will remain out of commission, and there will be ups and downs in terms of editorial output as we approach and tackle various bumps in the road. But anticipation is the purest form of pleasure, so.

“you do you” t-shirts made for the campaign

Next up, campaign promises! We raised $116,645, of which $40K goes directly to Cee and about $20K goes towards perks fulfillment and indiegogo/paypal/processing fees.

teamsters put together your lifesaver packages

Fulfilling Campaign Promises:

Perks

Alex has been coordinating the planning and execution of perks for all 1,822 funders, which includes creating and mailing 1,185 lifesaver packages, 98 batches of cookies, 411 t-shirts, 45 homemade cards and 38 Special Edition Redesign ‘Zine. That’s a lot of shit!

Cookies and t-shirts and lifesaver packages are going out soon. We’re all making home-made cards this month, the ‘zine is still being put together, and we’re gradually scheduling the non-physical perks like advertising, articles and hangouts.

If you donated, signed up for a perk of some kind, and haven’t heard from Alex yet, then please email her at alex [at] autostraddle dot com.

Milestones

We’ve done the “Call Your Girlfriend” Dance Video, printed “You Do You” boyshorts and put them on sale and coordinated a seriously epic international meet-up week.

We’re working on The Epic Music Video Featuring Alex Vega getting Tinkerbell tattooed on her ass, “Autostraddle This” boxer-briefs, the NSFW Sunday Coloring Book and The Queer Girl City Guide Guidebook.

Future projects with completely undetermined ETAs include The Best Autostraddle Day Ever and the livestream video situations.

So, that’s where we’re at! We’re gonna look so hot and fast in 2013 and I think you will, too.

Autostraddle Raises $116,645 In 45 Days, What A Wonderful World!

We did it! 45 days, $116,645. I believe that’s nearly three times our initial goal! We were pretty excited yesterday and shared a lot of feelings with you, and now it’s over and we’re even MORE excited than we were the last time we told you about our excitement!

WOW

I bet you’re wondering what happens next after we all finish hyperventilating, crying and rubbing our eyeballs. Well, our second A-Camp fires up this week — fun timing! — so most of the team is gonna be on a mountaintop in Southern California from September 10th-17th. Don’t worry there will still be content and people here. Kristen will draw you pictures.

When we get back, we’ll get cracking on all that growing and changing stuff, and get in touch with all of y’all about fulfilling your perks — what you want, when you want it, where you want it, if you like it fast or slow, and so forth. There are like 1,800 of you weirdos out there who did what you had to do to help us as much as you could, thank you.

We’ll also be fulfilling all those promises we made, like printing the NSFW Sunday Coloring book, re-building the entire website and making a celesbian-studded music video which will feature Alex Vega getting a tattoo of tinkerbell on her ass!

yup, that ass

In conclusion: thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. We look forward to celebrating you from now until the apocalypse.

Watch this space.

32 Hours Of Autostraddle Fundraising Remain, We Hit $100K, Let’s Talk About It!

They said we couldn’t do it. By “they” I mean everybody in the entire universe, but especially our families, our colleagues and, well, each other. We said it to each other sometimes. We said it while crying or while screaming or sometimes both. We said it mostly in the beginning, and less and less over the years, and now we never have to say it at all.

I never meant it, though. I knew we could do it. I wrote in my journal ‘we can do this’ over and over again. I know sometimes I was the only one who still believed we could do it, and sometimes it was just me and Laneia, alone on our little raft of “believing we could do it,” eating pita chips and watching the boats zip by.

Fast forward to barely a day into our campaign and already hitting the $40k mark, when Alex g-chats me:

Alexandra: I seriously think I might cry. I just had a moment.
All the facebook posts. The things our friends are saying when they post the campaign… It’s overwhelming me and I felt like crying.
Riese: alex vega!
you never cry!
this is crazy
you should cry!
you deserve it
look what we made!
Alexandra: These people are so invested. It means so much.
Riese: i feel like they never cease to amaze me
Alexandra: i can’t imagine how you feel.
all of this. it’s crazy.
I finally believe i can do this full time and want to
Riese: YAYYYYYYY!
Alexandra: And like, Taylor’s post on facebook about the campaign hit hard because the thing she said about us having to figure this shit out as we went along… and like, how fucking hard that was. And that I couldnt see where I (or we) were going, but here we are trucking along happily.
Riese: it was so hard!
Alexandra: all the internal/secret breakdowns I had trying to figure out media kits, and advertising and what CPM fucking meant for the 8th time and well, I can look back and be like I overcame that and figured some shit out!
Riese: i know, it’s crazy, like to think back on it
because the reason we kept going was because we/i felt right now was possible
but it was so hard and frustrating!
but now like
we figured it out
Alexandra: yeah
Riese: it just took time
Alexandra: I think we knew it was there… somewhere… but it was still so hard to see. or believe.
Riese: i’m proud of you
the future is bright
Alexandra: I’m proud of you too.

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NOW WE’VE HIT $100,000!

Back in April 2011 when we did a mini-fundraiser and raised $20,000 in ten days, you were buying us time to figure out what to do next, to figure out how to turn money into more money. Things were very different then — we were still epically short-staffed, for starters, and Laneia and I were the only ones getting paid.

This time I already know how to turn money into more money and it’s such a thrilling feeling! It’s better than ice cream! We’ve got so much planned for the future and so many new initiatives to rock your socks off, and I can actually start putting together a budget for paying even more writers.

Huge change won’t happen next week because camp is next week and we’ll have a lot of perks to fulfill upon returning, but it will happen soon and we are so excited about the future and little things are already changing. Even the last few weeks have been different — due to a Murphy’s-Law-enabled timing situation, my girlfriend and I had to find and move into a new apartment by September 1st, which is a lot to do on top of camp prep and my 80-hours-a-week job at Autostraddle and writing endless Real L Word recaps! But I was able to pay Carmen “Broke as F*ck” Rios to take over camp emailing, Laura to take over camp transportation, Bren to take over merch shipping and Rachel/Laneia/Laura to take over a lot of the day-to-day editing and we hired these new amazing writers and therefore I managed to both move and sleep at least five hours a night last week! On a really personal level, I’m just enormously excited that in October I’m gonna be able to see my family in Ohio for the first time in over three years — I used to see them a few times a year, but that all stopped when Autostraddle started. It’s not just about the plane ticket, it’s also that now I have the staff who can run the website without me when I’m wi-fi free in the cornfields of Reeseville, Ohio, population 63. So I want to thank you for that.

You hear me talking about money all the time, though, and about what the site needs and how we can get it and what we’re gonna do with it. But you don’t usually hear from the other team members and I thought that today, as we approach the final 24 hours of this campaign, it’d be a good time for some lesbian executive realness from some of the many crazy motherfuckers who make this shit happen.

Rachel:

rachel triumphantly raising a fist of beer in the air with laura, julia and lily – pride 2010

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intern // october 2009

writer // july 2010

senior writer // october 2010

associate editor // february 2011

senior editor // june 2011 – present

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Before the fundraising push hit $80,000, I made between $4 and $5/hr as Senior Editor at Autostraddle. My “day job” was and still is as a graduate student and instructor of freshman composition, which pays $11,300 a year. (Not per semester. Per year.) I don’t get paychecks from my day job over the summer, and so I babysat and took odd jobs (pouring beer and wine at a weird open-air community mixer thing! editing the memoirs of the wealthy elderly!) to pay my rent. Figuring out grocery shopping, both in terms of time and money, frequently seemed totally impossible. And now that we’ve managed to raise over $80,000, with some incredible person donating $1000 at once to push us over the edge? I know that I can go home to see my mother and brother for Thanksgiving, because I think I can afford the plane ticket. My working single mom with plenty of debt of her own asked if she thought I needed help to buy it, and I was able to tell her that I didn’t think I did. I can afford to fix the broken windshield wiper and AC in my car, which haven’t been working since May. I had set a goal for myself to try to pay down $500 worth of my unsubsidized student loans this summer, the ones that are still collecting insane interest even though I’m in school and can defer them. Last month I had resigned myself to not meeting this goal; now I think I might be able to pull it off.

I love my job, and the people that I work for and with, so, so much. When I even think about the possibility of not being able to do this work, I get physically uncomfortable and feel my eyes water and I want to make a drink. We try not to talk about it that much, but there have been several moments where we really thought we might not get to keep doing this, that we might have to call it a good run and go back to what we were before, whether that was temping or bagging groceries or trying to coax some thoughts about Maya Angelou out of college freshmen. Those moments were some of the saddest and scariest in my life. And more than anything, what this fundraising experience has done for me and for the website is show is that that isn’t the case. Whatever else happens, we’ve built a community of people that takes care of its own; we take care of each other. And now I feel so happy and lucky and confident about the fact that we can continue to make a space for people to take care of each other. We can afford to make more camperships for people trapped in unhealthy communities who need help, we can afford to make a website that actually works, and we can feed ourselves and also buy garbage bags, which is more important to the continuance of this website than you might think.

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Alex:

this is how alex was talked into doing autostraddle – march 2009

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design director // march 2009 – present

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The success of our redesign campaign has been extremely validating. I went home to my family recently and I was receiving “congratulations” on all sides… family, friends, and even long lost college friends knew of it and were congratulating me on the success. They were surprised, I think, that our readers put their money on the table for us like that. That our readers need us as much as we need them. They were as surprised as I was. And I bragged about how awesome our community is. This campaign changed how I felt about what we started, you see because when you start something — a new idea, a business, a shot in the dark — you have to talk about it like it’s real, like it’s a thing that’s going to succeed even though you’re not so sure of that yourself. This campaign means that I get to finally work for pay for a website I helped start, an effort that required a year and a half of free full-time work. This campaign is so validating we need to come up with a new word for “really super incredibly validating”.

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Bren:

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intern // july 2011

editorial assistant // may 2012 – present

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The amazing support of this campaign has allowed Riese to pay me to handle merch. I would totes do merch for free, but the monetary compensation makes my girlfriend tolerant of the shirts, totes, zines and stickers occupying 97% of our apartment and still willing to sleep with me. This benefits the readers because Riese doesn’t have to deal with merch and is free to write interesting things for their eyeballs to absorb!

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Laura:

laura gets a lift from katrina at pride 2009

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intern // may 2009

contributing editor // may 2011

associate editor // march 2012 – present

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Ooooh, the money helps like woah. I’m moving across the big bad ocean later this month and the fact that I get paid as an editor means that I will be able to keep some of my friends and the things I love when I move. If I hadn’t been promoted, I would’ve had to drop my contributing editor job at Autostraddle and spent my time finding some kind of semi-legal side gig to supplement my pretty tiny government income in España. Over the past couple of months, my extra set of eyes and hands means that, between the four of us, we’ve finally had the resources to bring on approximately 93 new writers and interns with Very Special Knowledge on everything from sex to Israel. And who doesn’t want more of that?

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Laneia:

laneia at dinah shore 2010

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writer // march 2009

associate editor // november 2009

executive editor // january 2010 – present

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I’ve gotten used to making lots of personal sacrifices so that my decision to work at Autostraddle, which is a low-income decision, wouldn’t negatively affect my two sons. For example, I haven’t had someone cut my hair in almost three years — which is fine, and not a big deal, because it just seemed like an obscene amount of money to spend on strictly myself, so I didn’t. There are other things too, like clothes — how could I justify spending money on pants that only I would ever wear? But that’s not the point because what’s important to me is the two shorties and you guys, and this. Not haircuts or jeans. We all have to prioritize and sacrifice, this isn’t a unique situation.

So obviously on Monday when I lost my shit and started crying in front of this stupid mirror because I was so tired of feeling sad about my hair, I felt even worse when I reminded myself what a terrible brat I was being for even thinking about my dumb hair, much less crying about it. So I stopped. But then I did some math and for the first time in longer than I care to recount, I realized that I could pay for a haircut without it screwing anyone else over. A couple of days later I booked a hair appointment with someone named Bonnie.

So it’s small but it’s huge. It’s being able to get delivery when I’ve had too many nights of emails and edits and tonight I just want to look my kids’ faces for some minutes or even hours between emails, instead of spending two hours preparing food to feed their faces. Or it’s a haircut.

It’s also big things that you have to make yourself believe that you deserve — like this new Macbook I’m typing on that Riese decided I needed after we hit $60k. I’d bought a netbook a few years ago — my first large electronic purchase of my life — because I decided that if I was going to work online, I should probably have a computer that actually worked and that I didn’t have to share. It was the most selfish $450 I’d ever spent. So anyway imagine my terrible crushing guilt when this zippy little netbook stopped being so fast, started overheating and was actually small enough that I eventually required glasses (the second most selfish purchase of my short life) in order to read things on it. But this isn’t a pity party! I’m sharing this to say that this Mac kicks that netbook’s ass. Turning on my computer isn’t a 10 minute-long process. I can have multiple programs running at once! I can edit a photo and insert it into a post while my coffee’s still hot.

I can do this job.

You got us to $100,000, which means Alex is getting a tattoo of tinkerbell on her ass, we’re getting an ideascale account, and you’re getting a crazy awesome star-studded music video event! It also means everybody here is really fantastic and awesome.

If we make $110,000, there are queer girl city guides in your future, and if we hit $120,000, we’ll make Lesbian Literary Month happen which I’m personally really pumped about. I mean these could be 24 really transformative hours. (Here’s that link again!)

But regardless — thank you. Thank you thank you thank you thank you forever. This is the best job ever, we are so blessed and so committed to keeping this ship running without any corporate involvement. It’s still your space, it’s our space, and we’ll do everything we can to  make sure that never changes.

$80K Celebration: Raffling Off Two September A-Camperships & Taking Straddle-Gif Requests

Yesterday  we surpassed the $80,000 threshold in our mad dash towards Ultimate Success Via Fundraising, which’s super exciting! We’re all on the edges of our proverbial seats anticipating a bright new tomorrow, in which Alex will be full-time (starting mid-September), our website will be brand-new and amazing (date TBA), Rachel will be paid more (starting now) and we’ll be selling ‘You Do You’ boyshorts (they’re being printed), a NSFW Coloring Book (we’re putting it together) and so many other beautiful things!

Let’s refresh your $80,000 bonus:

So clearly we’ve got some business to take care of.

1. We’re giving away TWO September A-Camp Camperships!

If you’ve donated to the campaign and would like to enter to win a campership — forward the email you got confirming your donation to bren [at] autostraddle [dot] com, and write CAMPERSHIP RAFFLE in the subject line. If you’re already registered for camp and win a campership, you can give it to a friend but you cannot use it for yourself.  This offer is only for September A-Camp, which happens from September 12th-16th in Angelus Oaks, California.

Because we’re on a time crunch for anybody looking to plan a vacation suddenly with three weeks warning, we’re going to be drawing and announcing the winners on Saturday. So get on that shit, now!

(If you have donated more than once, yes, you can enter the raffle more than once.)

2. Straddle-Gifs Is Taking Your Requests

Our Dear Loyal Brianna has constructed Straddle Gifs Dot Tumblr Dot Com for your viewing enjoyment and, as promised, will be taking requests for gifs now that we’ve surpassed 80k. You can request gifs from any videos on the You Tube Channels of riese, Words With Girls, autostraddle and Unicorn Plan-It YouTube pages. You have like 40 Haviland & Riese vlogs, 17 Julie & Brandy In Your Box Office Episodes, Autostraddle’s Life Work, etc. Most of our videos are on Riese’s channel. You can get lost in a k-hole all day long if you’re up for it!

3. ‘Zine perks

If you’ve already purchased a ‘zine, you’ll get to pick a You Do You t-shirt, home-made cookies or a handmade card — we’ll ask you which one you want when we get to the “perks fulfillment” stage in September. If you’ve not yet purchased a ‘zine you really should consider it, because you’re gonna get an extra thing!

4. What’s Next?

If you haven’t already donated, you really should! Lots of people have donated multiple times!

Happy Birthday Rachel!

It’s Rachel’s 24th birthday!

Rachel’s birthday happens once every year, thank goodness, but this year it’s even more special. Besides the fact that it’s on a Friday, it’s also smack in the middle of Autostraddle’s fundraising campaign!

Super quick refresher: In less than a day, Autostraddle readers raised over $40,000, enabling us to rebuild our site and give you everything you deserve in a community. Now we’re hoping to give you — and our staff — even more. Because of your dedication and generosity, we were able to hire Alex Vega as our full-time Design Director, and she will start in September! We’ve also designed new You Do You boybriefs, Autostraddle This boxer briefs, and there are lots and lots of cookies coming your way. We’re SO PROUD and SO EXCITED for the future! The Ultimate Dream Goal is $100,000, which would enable us to pay all of our writers and editors, as well as guarantee a tattoo of Tinkerbell on Alex’s behind.

Which brings us to this hallowed day, wherein you have the chance to help pay Rachel’s fair salary for a solid year. Everyone at Autostraddle works so very hard, but for a select few of us, it’s our one and only job. Rachel works here every day — literally all seven days of every week. Rachel has been writing for Autostraddle since October of 2009 and took on the Senior Editor position in 2010 and worked for free for a long time, then worked for a couple hundred dollars a month for an even longer time. She’s a very hard worker and, apparently, a very good budgeter.

How does Rachel find time to do so much AS work and live her life, which involves graduate school and teaching young humans how to write? We don’t know. Probably like this:

‘how does rachel do it?’ images via intern geneva

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[Click Here If You Love Rachel]

In addition to paying Rachel a more fair amount of money, when we reach $80,000 we’ll raffle off TWO A-Camp Camperships, provide an additional perk to those who purchased the Fundraiser Zine, hire an accountant, add to the medium-sized fund to pay all of our writers and contributors, and AND Brianna has promised to start taking requests on straddlegifs.tumblr.com! That is so many great things in one sentence!

[Click Here to Pay Rachel’s Fair Salary!]

To compel you to help us reach our weekend goal of just over $4,050, we’ve taken some of our favorite Rachel quotes and paired them with adorable pictures of Rachel as a babychild. I know — I didn’t think the world could be a better place either, and then this happened.

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“Most of the time, I fantasize about not having to worry about money. Not leading some kind of hedonistic lifestyle where you buy brand-name Saran Wrap, but the kind where you never have to check your account balance immediately after buying gas to make sure that you didn’t overdraft anything.” -Rachel

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[ Pay Rachel’s Fair Salary! ]

Autostraddle’s Get Baked Sale!

feature image via we are all made of kittens

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Hello and welcome to Autostraddle’s Get Baked Sale! In which we will sell as many cookies as you can order in one day. We’re super excited you’re here!

Quick refresher: In less than a day, Autostraddle readers raised over $40,000, enabling us to rebuild our site and give you everything you deserve in a community. Now we’re hoping to give you — and our staff — even more. Because of your dedication and generosity, we were able to hire Alex Vega as our full-time Design Director! We’ve also designed new You Do You boybriefs, Autostraddle This boxer briefs, and of course, Alex dance-covered Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend.” We’re SO PROUD and SO EXCITED for the future! The Ultimate Dream Goal is $100,000, which would enable us to pay all of our writers and editors, as well as guarantee a tattoo of Tinkerbell on Alex’s behind.

Which brings us to today! Autostraddle’s Get Baked Sale goal is $3,500, and it’s part of this week’s overall goal to reach $80k by Friday, so we can give our Senior Editor Rachel what every birthday girl deserves: a fair salary. Let’s take a look at all the delicious yummy treats we have up our alternative lifestyle sleeves:

Get Bake Sale Bonus! TODAY ONLY! Bren is also baking her world famous homemade dog biscuits, just for your dogs! Also your cats could probably eat them. Maybe even your toddlers, if you had toddlers. But Bren’s homemade dog biscuits are available TODAY ONLY — not any day in the future nor any day in the past.

See where it says we’ll accomodate any allergy or aversion? We mean it! Do you have an aversion to lemon, but still want some citrus butter cookies? Person, I will leave out that lemon, just for you. And when you say gluten-free, we know you’re not kidding — we will not mess around with your insides. We’ve just loved you for so long, and we’re super serious about your guts and feelings!

Here’s maybe the most important thing: today is the final and absolute last day you can order these tasty treats! We’ve been updating the available number of cookie perks so that all the people could have some, but that stops today. If you wake up tomorrow and decide you’d like to have a box of Laura’s finest homemade Oreos delivered right to your door, it will be too late. I don’t want you to live with that albatross of regret, and neither does your therapist.

[CLICK HERE TO ORDER SOME COOKIES TODAY]

via flickr

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Frequently Asked / Wondered Questions

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Will I be able to choose which cookies I receive? How??

Yes! After the campaign has ended, you’ll receive an email asking you which cookies you want and what your address is. In addition to the seven choices listed above,  cookie perks ordered today will also have the option of choosing Bren’s dog biscuits.

I have a serious allergy! How will I let you know about it?

You’ll tell us when you choose your cookie. We’ll remind you in the email.

I ordered the cookie perk a week ago. Will I be able to get Bren’s dog biscuits instead of cookies?

No. If you want some dog biscuits that Bren has made with her heart and her hands, you’ll need to order another cookie perk today. Does that seem insane? We just want to be able to pay our writers and editors who work so hard to make Autostraddle so fantastic, you know?

When will I receive my cookies?

Orders will begin shipping out at the end of September. You’ll get an email when we ship your cookies, so you can camp out by your mailbox with a thermos full of milk.

Can I have the cookies shipped to someone else’s address?

Yes!

What if I’m in Australia and I want snickerdoodles?

We will cross that bridge when we get to it.

How many cookies are we talkin’ here?

One dozen!

Who needs Autostraddle baked goods?

you
your mom
her mom
your dad
your best friend who just moved to a new city
your ex-girlfriend whose cat just died
your hairstylist
the roommate who never talks but eats all the food
someone celebrating a birthday in late September – October
people in forests
people on sidewalks
people on boats
tall people
people who are asleep
people who didn’t pay their cable bill
short people
people who inexplicably prefer grape jam over blackberry jam
et cetera et al ad nauseum

No one doesn’t need a cookie.

[I’M READY TO ORDER SOME COOKIES NOW]

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Real talk: Autostraddle is only here because of you — you know that, right? That there’d be no Autostraddle if you hadn’t been listening? And no conversations if you hadn’t spoke up? Thank you for your overwhelming support and love love love. You are absolutely the best people on the entire internet, end of story. We can’t wait to make you some foods!

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[TAKE ME TO THE COOKIES]

Please note that I purposely didn’t use any foul or suggestive language in this post, so you can forward the link to your grandma! Your boss! Anyone on earth, really.

It’s Alex’s Mindblowing “Call Your Girlfriend” Dance Video! Also, More Fundraising Updates!

by riese & laneia

Remember when Alex Vega promised to make a dance video after we surpassed $40,000 on our indiegogo campaign? Well it takes time to make dance videos, as I’m sure you’ve surmised, and since then we’ve raised an additional $20,000+, which is AMAZING! Like we’re seriously amazed. So! Now it’s your turn to be amazed , as Alex uses her special dancing skills to persuade you to call your girlfriend. With special guest, Arthur the dog!

I know it seems like we could never top this video, but when we get all the way to $100,000, we’ll have no choice but to top it (that’s what she said) because that’s when Alex will get a tattoo of Tinkerbell on her backside, Haviland Stillwell will sing a song, queer girls will dance and hand jive, and we’ll make the most amazing video ever. But first! Let’s look back at all the other awesome stuff you’ve secured by donating $65,000+.

$40,000

Alex Vega Dance Video + a brand new Autostraddle
Now can make Autostraddle as slick and user-friendly as you’ve always wanted, and we’ll be able to do all the things we’ve held in our hearts for the past eleventy years! We could weep, we’re so excited.

$50,000

You Do You boyshorts + cookie extravaganza
These sexy beast boyshorts are being sent to the printer this week and will be available for your generous little asses very soon. More on the cookies below. Wanna see the boyshorts? Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook, where we’ll be posting it tomorrow. (The website, on the other hand, will take some time!)

$60,000

Autostraddle This boxer briefs + International Meet-Up Week
Probably our most requested and dreamed of piece of merchandise, “Autostraddle This” boxer briefs are currently being designed by Alex. International Meet-Up Week is scheduled for September 22-30, so save the date. That’s over a week of Autostraddle fun for you and your friends/friends you haven’t met yet! There’ll be an official post about meet-ups super soon.

$65,000

This was a special incentive put together by Brianna: straddlegifs.tumblr.com, which is super special and awesome.

Now here we are, just under $70k (there was an accidental and possibly sangria-related donation last night of $5k but the donator contacted us this morning to say she didn’t mean to donate that much, so we’re trying to sort that out with indiegogo and the total you’re probably seeing now is actually $5k more than we really have), and only a couple thousand dollars away from making Alex a full-time employ of the site she co-founded over three years ago. And! A little over $10k away from giving Rachel the best birthday present a girl could get: a fair salary. So we’ve decided to make this week really count.

+ Today and tomorrow are officially Make Alex Full-Time Days. We need her here like we need sunshine and water, you guys. I know you know this. And I really truly believe we can make it happen TODAY. In addition to making Alex a full-time employ, you’ll be getting a NSFW Coloring Book and two livestream chats with a variety of team members.

+ Wednesday we’re having a Bake Sale, when cookie orders will be unlimited for one day only. You can have any food allergy on the planet, and I promise we will still be able to make you some cookies.

+ Friday is Make Rachel Full-Time Day. It’s Rachel’s birthday on 8/17, so the whole day will be dedicated to Rachel and how much we love her/want to give her a paycheck . She already has been working full-time for two years, she’s just not getting paid for it. In addition to making Rachel’s dreams come true, $80k will also mean a larger fund set aside for paying writers, which is everyone’s dream. Everyone who’s donated will be getting the chance to win one of Two A-Camp Camperships, plus people who bought the Limited Edition ‘Zine perk will also snag a bonus: You Do You t-shirt, cookies or a handmade card. Neat!

We’re gonna smash our heads together this week and come at you with some dates so you can anticipate when we’ll be in touch and fulfill things like ‘zines, advertising, meet-ups, t-shirts, etc., and when other various incentives will actually happen and website progress will be made. Nothing gets sent out ’til after the campaign ends, which is the first week of September, and we’re all heading up to camp the second week. We’ll have better dates for you soon!

You can donate right here!

Fundraising Update #2: What If We Raised $100,000? What Then?

After zooming past our goal of $40,000 in 21 hours, one couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps this campaign could enable us to be even more awesome than we’d initially imagined. Well, first we had to finish shedding our happy tears and set aside 24 hours to stare slack-jawed at the computer screen, dumbstruck by your incredible generosity and your belief in what we do — and what we can do together.

As discussed in the post about the campaign, most sites like ours launch with anywhere between $500,000 and $6 million to get their business going. Conversely, we launched with $539, so our scroll of “things we still need” is really long! Basically, everybody on formspring thinks we should declare a new goal of $100,000.

make it an even $100,000 in 45 days. Don’t be afraid to make an ask like that—especially after you’ve seen what 24 hours can do. If you’re feeling modest, Riese, let your readership propose: $100,000 IN 45 DAYS.”

On our last fundraising post, many readers suggested that sharing our Money Plans and Additional Perks with y’all would inspire more donations. So HERE WE GO!

You asked us about self-sustainability, and what that means with respect to a new website. Well, for starters, it will help our audience grow — we’ll have better search engine optimization, an easier site to navigate for newbies, a more impressive and professional feel and a social networking system that will enable us to evolve and develop a more solid online community. The more readers/viewers we have, the more we can make from advertising, merch sales, donations and events, and thus the more people we can hire and pay. Also, the more lives we can impact, the more social justice issues we can promote, the more quality artists we can support and the more awesome people we can talk to! We also hope that a larger audience will lead to a more diverse readership and a more diverse applicant pool.   We also have this crazy fantasy that one day we’ll be taken seriously by the rest of the media and be included on lists like this one. Part of that fantasy is a world in which we can pay not only our own writers, but also big-name writers we’d love to see on Autostraddle that we simply can’t afford right now.

Alex has been learning the ropes of online advertising for a few years now and has a keener understanding of how to optimize advertising spaces, develop relationships with brand partners, and effectively utilize Google AdSense than we did when we initially built this thing.

Ultimately, it takes money to make money and although it may seem like we grow and change on heart alone, honestly every major evolutionary stage of this website has corresponded with an increase in financial resources. This campaign never would’ve gotten off the ground if I wasn’t able to pay people to on-board ten new writers and interns, take over merchandise shipping, edit most of the nine posts we publish every day, and handle some of the other administrative work that keeps me away from writing and masterminding. Nor would we have a redesign at all if our Design Director wasn’t earning commission from ad sales that enabled her to not need another full-time job for the time being.

We do have a specific profit-building initiative we intend to launch once we get the site re-built and gather enough money to keep Alex on full-time — but we have to keep it a secret for now so nobody steals our idea! You’ll see. You’ll like it!

And don’t worry — just because something you’ve asked of us isn’t on this list doesn’t mean we’re not doing it! We could be in the middle of making it happen right now! We have a LOT of things to do on our to do list.

So, without any further ado…

What We Plan To Do With Your Money

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$40,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees – $3,200]

The 40k plan doesn’t cover the entire cost of the project — we lowballed it to avoid excessive fees (indiegogo charges 9% for campaigns that don’t reach their goal but 4% that do) and intended to pay Cee in installments over time if we weren’t able to raise enough from the campaign. We also have to pay 4.4% to indiegogo for credit card processing and 3% to paypal for paypal payment processing, regardless of whether or not we meet our goal.

What’s In It For You:

Dance Video: Alex will be doing a music dance video to the classic Robyn number, “Call Your Girlfriend.”

What’s In It For All Of Us:

This money will get us a faster, cleaner, better organized website, designed by Alex and hand-coded and developed by Cee, with a customized social networking component and a year of tech support. It won’t break down, it’ll feature responsive design that will work on all mobile platforms, and we’ll be in constant communication with you guys about how to make it better. We’re especially committed to making it easier for you to  meet each other, organize meet-ups and talk about your feelings on forums.

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$50,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees: $4,000]

$50,000 enables us cover the entire contract for our web developer, web designer and outside experts as well as covering the indiegogo fees and some of the perks fulfillment costs.

What’s In It For You:

More Things: We’re printing “You Do You” boyshorts, as requested, and added more cookie perks and t-shirt perks to the indiegogo campaign. The cookie-baking team is going to make a menu for you and you can pick the kind of cookies you want! Also, our Australian will happily send cookies to other Australians.

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$60,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees: $4,800]

$60,000 enables us cover the entire contract for our web developer, web designer and outside experts as well as covering the indiegogo fees and most of the perks fulfillment costs.

What’s In It For You:

Merch: We’ll print “Autostraddle This” boxer-briefs.

Meet-ups: We will organize another International Autostraddle Meet-Up Week!

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ Office equipment that will run as well as our website does!

+ Small fund earmarked for editor/writer payments

$70,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees: $5,600]

What’s In It For You:

NSFW Lesbosexy Coloring Book: We’ll design, assemble & print a NSFW Sunday Coloring Book.

Livestream: We’ll organize two livestream video situations featuring different team members answering your pressing questions!

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ Alex Full-Time: This is crucial to our growth, especially our financial growth. Alex is the site’s co-founder, our Design Director and ad salesperson, and is far more competent than the other co-founder (me, Riese!) at anything involving human speech, like coordinating partnerships with other organizations and planning events. As of a few months ago, Alex doesn’t have a full-time job and that’s how this redesign even happened. But we need to keep her after unemployment runs out! Alex is the driver for most of the money-making aspects of the business, such as designing merchandise and working with advertisers, and is also our most competent “face” of the business, considering most of us get heart palpitations every time the phone rings and only attend networking events for the  free cheese cubes. After our 2009 launch, Alex worked 40 hours a week for the site for 1.5 years without compensation, and when we all moved out west in 2010 and she got a full-time job, we lost her and it sucked! We would like to keep her now. Even the fact that she has another temporary part-time job right now is preventing us from moving forward as quickly as we’d like to.

$80,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $6,400]

What’s In It For You:

Extra Perk for ‘Zine-Buyers: Everybody who orders or has ordered the Limited Edition ‘Zine perk will also get their choice of a “You Do You” t-shirt, home-made cookies or a hand-made card by a writer/editor of your choice.

TWO A-Camp Camperships: We’ll raffle off TWO September A-Camp Camperships and everybody who has donated who wants to attend September Camp will be invited to enter — or, if you’ve already signed up, you can win the chance to bring a friend for free! (When we reach this point, you can forward your donation confirmation email to info [at] autostraddle [dot] com to be entered.)

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ An accountant! Seriously I spend so much time doing accounting these days. Also I have a feeling an accountant would be able to help us out w/r/t making more money.

+ Medium-sized fund earmarked to launch program to pay writers for their hard work and pay Rachel at least half of what she deserves for working full-time. (She has been working full-time for us for about two years for basically $2/hour)

$90,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $7,200]

What’s In It For You:

Your Best Autostraddle Day Ever: You pick our content for the day. You’ll be invited to submit story ideas and vote on other people’s story ideas, and the most popular ideas will be written!

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ In order to facilitate Your Best Autostraddle Day Ever and our future, we’ll be launching an ideascale (or comparable) area on the site where you’ll be able to submit your ideas, questions and concerns to us all in one happy happy place! No really, go check it out, you will want us to have that.

$100,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $8,000]

What’s In It For You:

Best Music Video Ever: An epic professionally-produced-and-edited music video conceptualized by Riese, Brittani Nichols, Haviland Stillwell, Sarah Croce, Alex Vega and Ashley Reed, with appearances by every single Autostraddle team member and starring Alex Vega as a young lesbian in Los Angeles getting Tinkerbell tattooed on her ass (as she has promised to do if we raise $100,000! You can see the design on the blue button here). It will feature an original song composed by aforementioned team with the working title of “You Saved Our Ass.” We’ll even pay the people who make it! There will also be lots of celesbian special guests, TBA – we will update you as we recruit more special guests and also if you’re reading this and could be a special guest, let us know!

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ A larger fund earmaked to pay writers/editors

From here forward I can’t tell you specifically where each dollar would go, because that’s part of what we’ll figure out as we go along and there are many factors to consider depending on the final tally.

But here’s some stuff we’ll for sure do for you if we hit these milestones:

$110,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees of $8,800]

Queer Girl City Guidebook: We’ll create and produce Autostraddle’s Ultimate Queer Girl City Guide, a book that will show you around every city worth living/visiting, from a local perspective, chock-full of original photography and insider tips.+

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$120,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees of $9,600]

Let’s Get Literary Month! Autostraddle will host a short story and a poetry contest for our readers and will feature a month of material focused on queer-lady literature, with interviews, original work from established authors and personal essays from the team. Also, Riese will launch the serial fiction series she’s been conceptualizing for years (which will eventually become a memoirish novel).+

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$130,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees of $10,400]

Complete A-Camp Campership: We will announce the dates of A-Camp May and we will cover the complete cost of tuition and transportation (up to $1,200) for an A-Camp Aspirant who lives outside of the United States to come experience the magic.

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$150,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $12,000]

Mobile App: We’ll make a really good one!

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$200,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $16,000]

TOUR! Autostraddle will go on tour, doing readings, workshops and presentations all over the country at colleges and performance venues, featuring a rotating roster of participating Team members.

by intern geneva

OK, now it’s your turn to donate or to solicit donations from other people!  Donate now!

Fundraising Update #1: Autostraddle Raises 40K In 21 Hours, Still Has 44 Fun-Filled Days Ahead

You did it! You raised enough money to buy us a brand spankin’ new website for our website! In less than 21 hours, Autostraddle readers raised over $40,000.

this was what it looked like at around noon pst on wednesday

First we gave you kiddens, now we’re throwing you a gif party!

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But wait! There are still 44 days left in this fundraising campaign, and we could always use more funds, so why stop at $40,000? To keep the ball rolling and your expectations on high alert, we’re coming up with some additional milestones. A reader wisely pointed out to Riese in the comments on the Indiegogo page:

“make it an even $100,000 in 45 days. Don’t be afraid to make an ask like that—especially after you’ve seen what 24 hours can do. If you’re feeling modest, Riese, let your readership propose: $100,000 IN 45 DAYS.”

So here’s the plan! Firstly, as promised, Alex will be doing a dance. Not just any dance — she’ll be making a “Call Your Girlfriend” dance video! It’ll be epic and probably your whole life will change.

Furthermore, if we hit $100,000 Alex will get a tattoo of Tinkerbell on her ass, using the same design pictured on this page (Alex and Riese sold buttons via Riese’s blog in 2008!)! This will also be epic.

We’ve been brainstorming all day, thinking of things we could do for you when we reach additional milestones. Ideas are ranging from Riese actually updating her personal blog, to Formspring Friday live (via livestream!), to you all choosing our content for a day based on what you’ve always wanted this or that or any person to write about. Videos have been a popular suggestion.

Let’s aim for the stars!

Take a look at these suggestions on Tumblr, then tell us what you want for every $10k after our goal. Ftr I’m all about NSFW Sunday coloring pages.

Why Queer Kittens Need A Better Autostraddle

So if you’ve been around longer than a couple of days, you’re familiar with the fact that Autostraddle has a tendency to break. This is because we have more readers and dreams than we have space and capabilities on this website, which is an interesting/frustrating predicament to be in. It’s stressful also, for all of us.

Earlier today we told you about our fundraising campaign to raise at least $40,000 so we could make our website a new website! We were really nervous about the launch.

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And even though we know that you believe in us, and that you need us as much as we need you, we were still sorta shocked/awed when we surpassed $10k. And then $20k. (!!!) We promised you a post full of kittens when we reached $10k, and here is that post.

For anyone who’s still on the fence — should you donate to Autostraddle or should you buy a new pair of jeans? — I present to you:

Who Needs Autostraddle? Everyone Needs Autostraddle!

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Also even you — you need Autostraddle! And we need you. Donate now!

We Need Help: Our Big Fundraiser To Build A Better Autostraddle

We need a website for our website.

We skipped that step. Most web-based start-ups would consider “hiring professionals to build a website” to be “Step One.” But our start-up budget was $539, and besides, we had Tess, who — like the rest of us — was learning the ropes as she went along, and working on coding whenever she could catch a minute, which was tough because she’s also a small business owner who works full-time and then some. We had Alex, too, the site co-founder, an enormously talented designer willing to work for free, like Tess was, because she believed in you and in the project and its potential.

Alex finished designing our present theme in June 2010, when we had about 23,000 views a day, and it took six months to code it and get it up and running. This incarnation went live in January 2011, when we were getting about 35,000 views/day. Now we have over 75,000 average views a day, and we’ve expanded to include much more than just blog posts — the social networking element you all requested, for example, has been a monumental endeavor.

In June of 2011, Tess officially declared that what the website needed at this point was above and beyond her skill set or what she had time to learn. We’ve spent a year investing in cheap or free labor and quick fixes. The site frequently crashes, over the last month we’ve had to strip off about 20 plug-ins to get it to load at all, we can’t grow, we can’t even accept new advertising with our current down time. Before removing some of the 30 plug-ins we were running (for a site this size, 0-4 is the recommended amount), our page load time was over a minute long (most websites load within 3-4 seconds).

Imagine a tiny house with six people inside. Imagine that 64 more people move in, but instead of making a bigger house, we just tack on a bunch of free-standing cardboard boxes and ask everyone to please squeeze. All the lamps are broken, only one power outlet still functions, using the microwave blows a fuse on the entire house and you have to exit through the back door ’cause the front door gets stuck. That’s our website.

this is the way that we live: exhibit a

We lack basic search engine optimization and always have. We’ve had to reimburse advertisers for lost impressions and repeatedly apologize to people wondering why the article we wrote about them or the article they wrote isn’t loading for their Mom to read.

The landscape is changing, everything is going mobile, and we are not keeping up. We’ve wasted endless hours and days with tech shit and mitigating disasters. A few weeks ago we tried to launch a page that begins the next step in our campaign with o.b. tampons and our entire website crashed!

But even more than wanting to fix those things, we want a platform secure enough for us to grow, have a viable presence in the marketplace, and attract more readers. Riese already works 80+ hours a week with the other editors and writers not far behind and we need a website that works as hard as we do.

We can’t avoid it any longer: it’s time to turn this shed into an actual building, or risk losing everything we’ve worked on thus far.

But building a website like ours —  original design, hand-coding from scratch, millions of monthly page views, customized social networking, a content management system, special features galore, the ability to update and change frequently — at the cheapest, we’re looking at $75K, possibly up to $250K or more. That might sound crazy to you, but most sites with traffic and features like ours start up with a solid chunk of venture capital or angel investments, usually garnered from networks enabled by things like “being a man,” investments which enable companies to hire people, pay them, and build the infrastructure of the site.

For example (all this information comes from Crunchbase), the I Can Haz Cheezburger Network pulled in $2 million for its seed investment ($32 million total from all subsequent funding rounds), Huffington Post launched with $2 million ($37 million total from all subsequent funding rounds) and eventually sold to AOL. OKCupid launched with $6 million and eventually sold to Match.com, BlogHer launched with $3.5 million ($13.5 million total from all subsequent funding rounds). Wowowow.com launched with $3.1 million, Refinery 29 with $500,000. Babble Media acquired $6.25 million in investments from 2009 – 2011 before selling to Disney. GayTravel.com raised $1.1 million in Venture Funding in 2008 to support their redesign.

You guys, Twitter has garnered $1.16 billion in investments and they haven’t even figured out how to make money yet! (We have!) (I know we’re not even in the same industry as Twitter, but you get the idea.)

this is the way that we live: exhibit b

Thanks to your donations, merch purchases and camp tuition, as well as to our advertisers and affiliate sales, we’ve pulled this company out of the red via heart and scrappiness, without any corporate support or big investors. We now operate on approximately a $10,000/month budget (usually less), which enables us to pay two people full-time wages slightly above the poverty line and four additional people stipends or commission, cover all author expenses, cover all our monthly bills (including $900 for web hosting) and every month offer a limb and a newborn baby to the IRS. Any potential profit is invested back into the company, and right now our priority is to be able to pay ALL of our writers for the work they do at Autostraddle, as well as to re-invest in new ventures, like The Autostraddle Print Annual and AS Classifieds, and hire support when needed in areas like accounting and PR.

We were feeling pretty hopeless until we found Cee. Cee is one of the best WordPress developers in the country with lots of helpful friends in high places. Cee has been helping us out (for free!) for a few months now, helped us get onto a better server and has kept us running during these trying times. Cee typically makes between $150 and $300 an hour doing what she does, which we clearly can’t afford.

this is the way that we live, exhibit c

But here’s the thing: you guys are really awesome and really gay, and Cee is also really awesome and really gay. This community is incredibly inspiring and motivating, and y’all have a way of making people who work here really feel valued and important.

There’s more to say about this, but for the sake of expediating the process of you giving us your money, let’s cut to the chase:

+

We’re trying to raise at least $40,000 on Indiegogo!

What that’ll pay for:

* Web Developer: That would be Cee, who has also built websites for AMC and Bergdorf Goodman and has 13 years of experience in web development & design.

* Website Design: We’ve snagged this really great designer named Alex Vega, cut-rate — and we wanna keep her! You guys, if she goes and gets a full-time job again, what will we do?!

* Expertise: Cee is gonna dig into her network of esteemed specialists and get geniuses who can construct things like “a social network.”

* Tech Support and Ongoing Maintenance

* Custom Server Configuration

If we exceed our goal, all the extra money will go back into the business — site upgrades, equipment upgrades (legal copy of Final Cut, point-and-shoot camera, etc.) and paying people. If we get a million dollars then we’ll build an office and you can all come over for tea!

Now, listen up!

Our recent Reader Survey has revealed a troubling — but also promising — statistic. Only 13% of you have ever donated to Autostraddle! Only 18% have ever bought merch! When you consider that and think about how much money we’ve managed to raise from that 13%, just imagine if the rest of you pitched in!

So, what’s in it for you, besides the fact that we will still exist in September? Well, we’ve assembled some pretty rad perks for our donators, if you’re into that, such as:

+ Advertising: We’re building a prominent Redesign-Supporter-Only Ad Spot (125 x 125 pixels) into our new website layout. You get to place an advertisement in there for one week. Want to promote your business, blog, service, or maybe ask your girlfriend to marry you on our website? This is a pretty damn good way to do it.

+ Redesign ‘Zine: Get our first and only 32-page Redesign Supporter-Only Newsletter we made just for this campaign, featuring completely original and never-released writing and content from Riese and the other editors, as well as behind-the-scenes photos and all sorts of special stuff that will only exist in this newsletter. PLUS: Lifesaver Package

+ Lifesaver Package: We’re custom-making a special package just for this campaign: a 2″x6″ Read a Fucking Book bookmark, Autostraddle tattoo, 2″x2.5″ Whiskey Kitten sticker and a mini “You Do You” sticker!

+ Design Tutorial: 1 hour Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign tutorial from our Design Director Alex via Skype or in person if living in or willing to travel to Los Angeles.

+ Hangout: 30 minute Therapy/Advice/Brunch or hang-out Skype session with Riese, Rachel & Laneia or any two (2) Autostraddle team members of your choice.

+ Writing Tutorial: A short story or essay critique/workshop/tutorial from Rachel & Riese.

+ Priority A-Camp Registration: Snag a guaranteed spot at the next A-Camp of your choice!

+ Limited Edition “You Do You” T-Shirt: Super Special/Awesome Limited Edition Autostraddle “You Do You” t-shirt. We’re only printing 300 exclusively for this campaign. This is the only way you can get one!

+ Be an A-Camp VIP: Come to A-Camp… as a team member! Work as little or as much as you want, but you’ll stay with us, come to pre-camp training, participate in planning activities, whatever your little heart desires! Plus, you’ll be guaranteed a regular spot at all future A-Camps… FOR LIFE. (Lifesaver package included, obvs)

+ Dinner or Meet-Up: Two or more of your local Autostraddlers will either throw you a meet-up in the format and at the time, place and format of your choice OR take you out to dinner! (You must live in or be able to get to NY, LA, SF, DC, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Portland, Chicago, Sydney or Ann Arbor/Detroit).++

This is the part where we take a deep breath and pray! Oh and — for those of you who appreciate our endearing kitten photographs begging for your money, we have plenty and will post them as soon as we clear the $10,000 mark! I hope that motivates you.

Also thank you to Intern Geneva for the infographic and Intern Sarah K for help on the video!