Whilst the New Year marked the beginning of a new decade and the mouth watering prospect of a fantastic new season, it also means the Christmas holidays have come to an end, and Christine and I are heading back to our day jobs.

Sidepodcast is, was and hopefully always will be, a rather brilliant hobby that we love doing to fill our free time. We've been asked a number of times over the holiday period if there's anything that people can do to help make our lives a bit easier, so this post addresses a couple of pro-active things that anyone can get behind to help out.

Donate your heart to a stranger

This site has been ad-free for over a month now, and we're not planning on bringing them back anytime soon. This means Sidepodcast is now fully funded by the kind contributions of listeners and readers. If you've enjoyed Sidepodcast for the past three years, please do consider a small donation for 2010. You have our word that every penny donated goes into making the site and the shows better and better. The easiest way to donate is via Payal, and the buttons below will allow you to make a one time, or recurring donation.

Writing to reach you

As mentioned earlier this week, over 20 guest writers put their thoughts and experiences down in words last year, and JPancoast kicked this year off in style. We encourage anyone who doesn't already have a blog, to get one (they're free and take no time at all to set up), but equally we love to receive guest posts.

If you have time on your hands, and opinions, photographs or experiences to share, please do let us know. We're especially keen to hear thoughts that differ from ours, so drop your details in the following box and we'll get back to you.

You've got the love

Nothing helps us out more than spreading the good Sidepodcast word. We're beyond hopeless when it comes to marketing and self promotion but we do try to make sharing stuff as easy as possible. You'll find Twitter and Facebook links beneath each post should you stumble upon something you'd like to pass around, but if there's anything we can do that makes it easier for you to coerce your friends into listening, watching and reading please let us know.

In return, Christine's always on the lookout for interesting content to link to in her daily posts, so if you've written something worth reading, or have content to share with us, do yell in the comments and we'll plug as best we can.

Make our homepage your homepage

Seeing as we now have a super fast homepage (and one of the fastest F1 blogs around), we're encouraging anyone and everyone to set Sidepodcast as their default browser homepage.

You can copy and paste the https://sidepodcast.com/ URL into your browser options/preferences and we'll do our best to keep the page updated with fresh F1 content.

Those are a couple of ways you can help Christine and I out. We already ask so, so much of people - from leaving a short comment to hosting their own podcast, and we very much appreciate it when people respond. There's much to be done this year, and our lists never seem to get shorter but if there's anything else we should be doing to make your or our lives easier, please let us know in the comments.