Re-Post: Nearing Midnight for February 27th (Part 1)

The March to May Donation Drive

In the time since our last donation drive, we have achieved a number of major accomplishments. The site's ranking among other prophecy ministries is the most noteworthy.
According to a service that tracks all web activity, Rapture Ready has now become the #1 prophecy site. We were able to achieve this goal despite having two of our main functions on different domains - RR News and the RR Message Board.
The media continues to show interest in the site, and there has been an amazing amount of attention from Great Britain, where RR has caught the eye of four media outlets. In December, a film team from BBC filmed Terry and me for an April documentary. In January, RR was mentioned in a British documentary called "The Source of All Evil." BBC radio stopped by last week to interview me for a March program. And another company is in the early stages of production of a documentary it is putting together.
On this side of the Atlantic, the Dallas Observer asked for my input for an article that appeared in mid-February. A & E has been running a program that talks about the Rapture Index.
As we add new web pages to the site, the search engine keeps pointing people to our domain. The lack of free end-time related information on the internet shows that there is plenty of room for us to expand the site.
We are progressing towards our goal of translating articles into Japanese. I have to admit, it has been quite a challenge to accomplish this task. We had thought the project would cost around $4,000 to translation 10 articles. The size of some articles has bumped the price tag up to around $7,000. Because the translation service calculates fees by word count, the first article, which was short, came to around $400. The next one translated was just over $1000. Rather than cough up the money all at once, we'll just take our time and eventually get all ten articles translated.
When I last mentioned our plans to add Japanese articles to the site, few people asked me why I didn't consider using programs that automatically translate English text into other languages. I've tried a free version of this software at Altavista.com, and I the found translation to be of such poor quality we could never use it on the site. You can't tell people something like, "Me think Jesus you need savior repent go now."
Another costly project is going to be the reformatting of thousands of pages on the site. Now that the average screen width size is larger that 1000 pixels, the pages containing the RR stripe in the left column have presented a major problem. This background image repeats across the screen, making it difficult for some people to read the text.
Over the years, the look of the site has been updated dozens of times. When we had just a few hundred files on the site, it was easy for me to make the changes. Now that we have more than 11,000 files, an update will require us to hire a web design firm to help make all these changes.
Every major project we take on requires us to ask for assistance from dozens of people to cover the cost. For example, the $1000 Japanese article would require 20 people to donate $50 each.
Because we constantly lose supporters, I have to make these regular appeals to maintain a balance in our funding. Even though we have a base of more than 100,000 visitors, we're lucky to receive help from a fraction of that number.
The opportunity to contribute to the Kingdom of God is not a constant thing. Over the years, we lost supporters to death, poor health, and financial reversals. We've even lost a few supporters from the area affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Rapture Ready didn't get to be the top-ranked site by accident. This site is the result of people realizing that they are part of the Great Commission.
An easy way to support RR is with an automatic monthly donation. The PayPal subscription service and allotments set up through a bank are convenient ways to send funds to the site. If you're interested in signing up, you can find the link on the Donation Depot page. Donations can also be sent to our PO Box at:
Rapture Ready Min.
PO Box 125
Bellevue, NE 68005

-- Todd