Announcing TipTheWeb Tip Buttons!

We’re super excited to finally announce a major new feature for TipTheWeb which we’ve been working on for a long time, and which is the #1 most requested feature from people giving us feedback: Tip Buttons!

Publishers can place Tip Buttons on their website, which lets people tip the publisher’s content without leaving the page. The buttons work much like the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet does, letting users create a Tip, and optionally fund and share it.

Here’s a large Tip Button that tips the current page: Tip This

Here’s a small Tip Button that tips a specific link: Tip

If you click on a Tip Button (try it out!) you will see the Tip Widget pop up, prompting you to choose an amount:

Simple Integration

You can read all the details in our docs, but one of coolest things about the Tip Button API is that at the most basic level, a Tip Button is just a URL to http://tiptheweb.org/tip/. You can customize the behavior of the button by adding query parameters to the URL, such as adding a “link” param to specify what the Tip should link to (which by default is the page the Button is on).

There’s a small snippet of javascript to add to the page as well, and this enhances the Tip Button links to pop up the Tip Anywhere widget, letting the viewer create a Tip without leaving your site. But without the javascript, it’ll still work, falling back to a Tip form on the TipTheWeb.org site.

Advantages of Tip Buttons

One of the most important features of TipTheWeb is that you don’t have to go through any technical integration to get tipped by people- everything works using the language of the web, publicly accessible URLs, and TipTheWeb users can use the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet to tip your content.

However, there are some big advantages to adding Tip Buttons to your website, both for you, your audience, and TipTheWeb:

Tip Buttons remind and encourage visitors to consider supporting your work as a publisher, at just the moment that they have enjoyed reading or seeing your content.
Not everyone who visits your site will be a TipTheWeb user (at least not yet :-) ) Tip Buttons work well for new users, and we make sure that we save the Tip they make in their account when they sign up.
Tip Buttons allow you to customize the Tip to link to a different page than where the button is. This is really useful in situations like blog landing pages, which show multiple posts on one page, but where you’d rather have Tips that identify the specific post (using a permalink) that the user likes, rather than just the blog host. This is also useful if you are embedding content like YouTube videos in a website, and you want the Tip to link to the YouTube video URL.
The Tip Buttons also give the user an opportunity to share their Tip on Facebook and Twitter. Doing so will promote your content to a wider audience.
Finally, Tip Buttons help to promote TipTheWeb itself, which benefits everyone by coming closer to realizing TipTheWeb’s vision of Community-Supported Web Publishing, where we all participate in making the internet better.

Getting Started

Take a look at our Tip Button documentation, or, if you’d rather skip the details and go right to getting Tip Buttons on your site, try out our Button Builder tool, which can generate copy-and-paste-able code to add buttons to your site. You can read more about our buttons at our integration FAQ page.

Our Tip Buttons are brand new, so we’d love to get feedback from publishers to let us know how well they’re working. Contact us at feedback@tiptheweb.org

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