If you’re a reg­u­lar online, you prob­a­bly know or know of Blake Carver. Even if you’ve never met him, you know his work. He’s been run­ning and main­tain­ing the incred­i­ble LIS­News hub since 1999. This con­tri­bu­tion alone is why many of us admire him for his ded­i­ca­tion and vision.

In 2002, Blake started LISHost, an afford­able web­site host­ing ser­vice for libraries and libraries. On the very rare occa­sion the LISHost server goes down, you can tell something’s amiss because half the known LIS world must house their sites there. I do, as does Michael Stephens, and we can both tell you from first-hand expe­ri­ence that Blake does a super­hu­man job of main­tain­ing the server (espe­cially secu­rity) and pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal support.

I can’t think of a time when Blake hasn’t responded imme­di­ately when there was a prob­lem, when he said no to a request to add soft­ware just for me, or when he didn’t come up with a cre­ative solu­tion to a prob­lem no one else would have wanted to deal with. And for all of his hard work (truly, the man must not sleep), he charges next to noth­ing for the ser­vices you get.

So to thank him for all of his efforts, both on our behalf and for the pro­fes­sion, Michael and I are raf­fling off a Nin­tendo Wii to help show our appre­ci­a­tion in the form of a fundraiser. Please note that nei­ther LISHost nor LIS­News is in finan­cial trou­ble, and this is not a call to “save” them. This is sim­ply a way for us to acknowl­edge Blake’s efforts and thank him for every­thing he does.

So here’s how it works. Every­one who donates $10 or more to LISHost by 11:59 p.m. on March 14, 2008, will be eli­gi­ble to win the Wii. We’ll pull a name out of the dig­i­tal hat, so-to-speak, and send you the Wii if you’re the lucky win­ner. To enter/donate, click on the but­ton below. Your dona­tion is your entry, as we’ll have a full list of names from Paypal.

Update: The dona­tion period has closed. Thanks to those of you who contributed!