It's funny how life changes, and with it your vision of who you are and what you would love to be. I find as we age that we refine the image we have for ourselves, and with it what we hope to contribute to the world.

For the last 10 years or so I have been working for startups, companies and clients building things for them that may or may not affect the read world in a positive way. I am good at finding quick, solid solutions to problems, decent at communicating and have a passion for dreaming big.

These qualities have made me an asset at almost every place I have been employed, and to nearly every client who has worked with me. It has been fun, and while I still enjoy that pursuit, I find myself more and more wanting something different for my life.

My two great passions are writing and creating. I love to create things that help people. That is why I got into open source in the first place. I also love to write. It has been a consistent love of mine since middle school.

The very best moments in my life are when I have been able to combine the two: writing something that helps people. The Holy Grail. Unfortunately over the past couple of years I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to find the time to combine these two passions consistently. Where I used to be able to write long, well thought out articles and tutorials once a week, I am lucky if I get one crafted every 3 months now.

If I am honest with myself, really honest, what I want to do with my life is write, and create things that help communities grow and prosper. I want to write code for WordPress and Habari and give it away for free.

I want to write articles that unpack some of the more difficult aspects of programming, design and ideation that communicates them in an easy to understand, approachable way. I want to get back to what made me so happy, no so long ago.

The problem of course is that I have a wife and two children (two!) and they need pesky things like food, shelter and the occasional gift. So I take the things that drive me as a human being and sell them to the highest bidder. Don't get me wrong, I am thankful for the work and have been fortunate to work with some great people.

But it isn't the same as waking up every day and saying to myself "How can I make things better today?", and then doing it. I used to be able to do that, because I was younger, dumber and had less of the world hanging over my head.

Then all of a sudden, like a bolt from heaven, this article fell into my virtual lap. After reading it, things began to become clear. To come into focus. What Michael was doing, in essence, was the modern equivalent of patronage.

Patron
a person who supports with money, gifts, efforts, or endorsement an artist, writer, museum, cause, charity, institution, special event, or the like: a patron of the arts; patrons of the annual Democratic dance.

As a classically trained artist and lover of Art History I am quite familiar with the concept of Patronage, since most of the masterworks from the Baroque, Romantic and Gothic periods were made possible by the patronage of a wealthy family or individual.

While this has gone out of practice, the concept is sound, and with todays technology, easily democratized and crowd sourced. While Michael's Square Cash link/button is a great example, there are others like Gittip, and of course Kickstarter.

So what am I getting at exactly? For years tens of thousands of people visited this site daily looking for the next thing I was going to write, explain or in the case of code or design, share. I would like for that to happen again. I would like to be able to share what I know, my talents and passions with our community again, and to help foster new people in our community, as I once did.

But to do that I need help internet. A lot of it. I would love to make 2014 the year I stopped working for clients, and started working for people. I would like to write a long, in-depth tutorial every two weeks and release plugins, designs and code once a week.

I would love to again be able to wake up every morning, check my comments and emails and decide what to do. As many of you know I have co-authored or authored two books on WordPress and loved it. I would love to begin writing digestible ebooks on WordPress and Habari that would be available to all who choose to become patrons, and offered at an affordable rate for those who do not.

If you don't know me from my past exploits, or need a refresher as to why I might be worthy of your patronage, here are some of my more noteworthy entries on this site over the last 11 years.

• Secrets of WordPress Theming Part 1
• Secrets of WordPress Theming Part 3
• K2: The Successor to Kubrick — AKA like that function file you can use in your theme? You're welcome.

As for my involvement in WordPress, I created the first Dashboard, as well as helped identify and patch a number of bugs before settling into the role of plugin author and tutorial writer. Hit trac for the evidence.

And of course my foray into publishing. Here I am on Amazon!

And here is my Author Page! More to come there soon.

Still with me? Good. What I am proposing is that once all of my contractual obligations are satisfied I will effectively shut down my company and shift all of my time and focus to writing great content here, and producing great open source plugins, themes, etc.

To do this, I need 200 people to commit to becoming patrons to the tune of 50/month. This will give me the minimum I need to support my family. Those first 200 who pledge to support me at this level will be able to choose, from time to time, what I will be writing on, or creating. We'll have a voting system in place I would think. The item that gets the most attention will be done.

I would love to hear from you about this. The good and the bad. Please share this around with friends or colleagues who might be interested. I think this could be really great for everyone if we make it happen.

Oh and as a sign of good faith, I am going ahead and releasing my USAToday inspired Theme Framework under the GPL today.

You will also need the Advanced Custom Fields Plugin to make everything go. I will be writing some documentation for it soon. For now things should be self explanatory if you look at the code.

You can file issues on Github for the framework, or ask about it here in the comments. I am excited to see where we can go in 2014. Should be exciting!