Welcome to a new series of posts about meta (meaning self-referential) content for That Ferret Blog. These posts are about the website itself, i.e. maintenance downtime, news, new features, changes, etc.

One thing to note is that the meta posts won’t show up in the main feed on the home page or archive, so if you’re interested in what’s going on with the blog, you’ll have to check in from time to time or use the RSS feed for the meta series.

We floated the idea around for a bit, but now, thanks to a Reddit user who also suggested it, here we are.

So, without further ado!

News

New logo and branding

You may have noticed we recently got a shiny new logo, favicon, and banners across our social media and the blog. I think they really bring everything together. And if I do say so myself, they’re all fantastic!

A huge thank you and shout out to the wonderful ilustraliine, who we commissioned to design and create these for us. You did a fantastic job!

You can find ilustraliine here:
insta
ko-fi

We have a Ko-fi!

You’ve probably seen the fancy floating “support us” button. This button opens a little donation window where you can donate to support the running and maintenance of this blog.

Fund us at ko-fi.com/thatferretkofi

We’re planning to open a shop on ko-fi too! There, you’ll soon be able to purchase vinyl stickers of our logo, Boots, Toots, the ferret paw print (also designed by ilustraliine), and ‘paw-traits’ lovingly painted by our ferrets :).

All proceeds are split 25% to 75%

  • 25% will go to CFWRS, the ferret society we are members of and the newsletter editors for (and where we rehomed Boots & Toots from).
  • 75% will go to site maintenance and reordering stock.

We’re currently operating as a not-for-profit, unincorporated association, and we are not a charity. This does not mean we cannot make a profit (although if we did, we’d pay corporation tax). CFWRS is also not a charity, and the 25% of proceeds we give is not tax deductible.

We pay an optional platform fee of 5% to Ko-fi on all transactions (this allows us to use extra QoL features) and a 1.5% + 20p transaction fee to Stripe as our payments provider. (This is the reason for our minimums on Ko-fi.)

You should not feel obligated to give us anything! The site will not disappear, and CFWRS will not fall to ruin if you don’t want to or can’t donate.

If you do want to, please only donate or buy something if you can afford to!

The society does its own fundraising at events and through memberships. You should also consider attending the events and/or becoming a member!
You can find our upcoming events at cfwrs.org.uk/events and our newsletters at cfwrs.org.uk/newsletters.

Disclaimer: CFWRS is not directly involved with this blog or its writings. While we have permission from its committee and members to discuss and endorse CFWRS, this does not imply that CFWRS endorses this blog.

New features

‘Support us’ button

As mentioned above, we have a fantastic little Ko-fi widget! Just click it, and it opens a fancy little donation window. Look at it down there on the left — how cute!

GitHub

While not technically a new feature, we have a public GitHub repo containing all the source code for That Ferret Blog. I’m very aware the crossover of people who read this blog and those who use Github may be small, but it’s there if you’re interested.

I considered using GitHub issues for bug reports and requests. It is public, so please feel free to use it. But note that website operations are a one-man band (me). I may take a while to get around to it.

We are also considering setting up an email for the blog. I really wanted to set up a mail form on a contact page, but this is a static site (if you know, you know), so we’ll likely add an email address to a contact page.

Meta posts

And finally, of course, we have these meta posts (ooooh, how meta!).