Sponsors:
Since it first went online in 1995, The Nearby Café has survived without sponsorship, supported by modest infusions of cash to cover basic hardware, software, and cyberspace rental costs, and fueled by the almost entirely volunteer energies of its editor/publisher and others. However, we're not averse to sponsorship; we just haven't found anyone who doesn't want to meddle with our tone or our style or our content — who loves us just the way we are. Want to become a Café sponsor? Know someone who might? Click here.

Friends:
Our patron saints (one blushes at praise, the other doesn't), Marc and Nacia Miller of the Toronto-based web-design firm Crossbeam, graciously donated their time and skills in 2004-05 for the splendid, long-awaited makeover you're now viewing, the Café's first complete design/infrastructure renovation since the mid-'90s. Their work speaks for itself. We can't thank them enough — especially as they've promised to keep an eye on us and trouble-shoot when necessary. (For some nods to our Old Friends, click here.)

Suppliers:
After years of trial and error, and our fair share of abuse (or at least disappointment), we have settled on a cluster of service providers and hardware/software manufacturers whose services and products make this site possible. Herewith our unsolicited testimonials for these:

		Our host ISP for The Nearby Café is Godaddy.com; great service, great price. They also handle domain-name registrations for the project. They even have a thoughtful founder and CEO, Bob Parsons, whose blog at their site actually makes for interesting reading.
		Online book sales, purchases, and other electronic funds transfers go through 2checkout.com.
		A. D. Coleman and John R. Alley work with the Adobe software line — Adobe GoLive, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe ImageReady — to create and manage this site, and we're Mac addicts.
		Crossbeam, the Toronto-based web-design team, produced this redesign of the Café using Macromedia Dreamweaver. And they work in PC format — but we'll forgive them anything.
		Executive Director A. D. Coleman uses Mariner Write as his word processor of choice. Most of the Café's text content now passes through this program en route to the web. Though not (yet) the killer-app successor to Coleman's all-time favorite, AppleWorks, Write seemed the logical alternative when Apple's lamentable abandonment of that program forced him to look elsewhere. Not near perfect, but damn good.
		Ye Executive Director becomes increasingly (albeit belatedly) convinced that database operations constitute the core of all his computer-related activity. FilerMaker pro is his db program of choice.
		Our microphone of choice for the production of our original audio files is the nonpareil MicFlex, from MacMice — elegant, versatile, and cheap at twice the price.