How You Can Help
Access to Insight

If you would like to help the Dhamma grow and thrive in the on-line world and beyond, Access to Insight offers you many opportunities to help. If any of them sound interesting, or if you have some other ideas, please let me know.

Proofreading

Be on the lookout for typos, broken links, spelling errors, grammatical blunders, or any other problems in ATI's pages. Keep a close eye especially on new items as they appear on Access to Insight's » What's New page, as these generally haven't yet been seen by many eyes.

If you have a sharp eye for details, take a look at ATI's style sheet, which describes in excruciating detail some of the elements that go into an ATI page (spelling, punctuation, HTML, layout, etc., etc.). If you come across any departures from that style sheet on the website, please do let me know.

Link-watching

As you surf the web, keep an eye out for Theravada websites that might be of interest to Access to Insight's visitors. If it's not already listed in the Other Theravada Sources pages, perhaps it should be.

Transcribing books

Are you a good typist? Do you have a good eye for detail? You can help by contributing your skills to Access to Insight's Dhamma Transcription Project, which gives volunteer typists the opportunity to transcribe into digital format high-quality free Dhamma books for distribution on-line via Access to Insight. These books have already been approved for on-line distribution by their copyright holders, and are waiting for someone to type them in. Here's how it works: (1) I provide you with a photocopy of the book (yours to keep). (2) You type (or scan) the book and spell-check it using your favorite word processor. (3) You send the file to me via e-mail. (4) I do the final proofreading and formatting of the book and eventually release it to the world on Access to Insight.

There are no strict deadlines. You decide how fast you want to work — take a week or take six months; it's up to you.

To read about the procedures in more detail, see "Transcribing a book."

HTML and CSS assistance

Are you a whiz with HTML and CSS? You can help by keeping an eye on the use of HTML and CSS throughout the website. I'm slowly migrating the website to CSS and am learning it as I go, which means I'm probably doing some things very inefficiently. See any errors or oversights in the CSS style sheet? Are there better ways to do things? Keep in mind that the goal here isn't to be at the bleeding edge of technological innovation; it's simply to make the website transparently easy to use for as many people (and browsers) as possible. I welcome your suggestions.

Cybersquatter eviction

In 2004 I decided to take steps to protect Access to Insight's good name by securing the domain names accesstoinsight.net, accesstoinsight.us, and accesstoinsight.info. But, alas, I was too late for the most desirable one of all: » accesstoinsight.com. Netster, a notorious Internet cybersquatter, beat me to it. I have tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to kindly relinquish the .com name to me. I naïvely thought that ATI's seniority (we've been on the web for more than 10 years — an aeon in Internet time), its friendly non-commercial nature, and an offer of a modest sum of money would be all it would take. Not so. If you have had any success dealing with companies like Netster and would like to put that experience to good use for ATI, I'd be very grateful.