I’ve decided on a new tradition that I want to do each Thanksgiving. I’m going to review all of the plugins, Open Source code projects, etc. that have helped me out in the past year and make donations to them. Oftentimes when I download something there’s a note there asking for a small donation/tip if you find the plugin/code useful. I always think, “Well, if I do then I’ll come back and donate. But I can’t donate now because I don’t know if I’ll actually end up using it.”

Problem is, when I do end up using it I forget to go back and give them a tip. But I have come up with a solution that I’m implementing starting now. First I’ll determine a budget for how much I want to donate in total – $65 this year for plugins and services. Then I’ll go through and find then ones that I feel I should donate to. This is what I came up with this year:

WordPress Database Backup – $15 : I love having the piece of mind that I get a database backup emailed to me each week. I just set it up and forget about it. Plus, I screw around with my Wordpress DB a good bit and I really don’t know what I’m doing. So this is as much protection from myself as hackers or server failures.

WP Easy Uploader – $10 : Installing plugins in Wordpress is such a hassle: find it, download it, un-zip it, upload it to server, install. Rinse-repeat. This plugin takes out all, most, of that hassle by downloading and unzipping the plugin or theme directly onto your server. It has easily saved me 30 minutes of tedium this year.

Wikipedia – $25 : I don’t know what I’d do without this site. I’m there every day looking up some odd thing or another. It’s easily worth this to keep it up and running and ad free.

Kimili – $15 : I don’t know what I’d do without this plugin. If there’s another way to embed a SWF in a Wordpress post I don’t know about it. And if there is it can’t possibly be easier than Kimili.

I also gave $50 to kick start a fund raising drive at WeCanBuildAnOrphanage.com to help abandoned children in Haiti who were born with AIDS. You can read more about it here.