Multi-Author Websites Now Supported!

Until now, TipTheWeb has supported two types of sites: 1) independent websites (no integration required), where Tips go to the site publisher, and 2) popular publishing platforms like YouTube, Flickr, etc with custom integrations to support tipping individual accounts.

Today, we are excited to announce support for a third type of site, ones which have content produced by multiple authors or contributors. A website like this can now be set up so Tips go to the individual authors of pages.

For Tippers:

In the past, tipping a website — even if it had multiple authors — meant that the publisher of the site would receive the Tip, and it would be up to them to share any TipTheWeb award money with any other contributors to the site.

Now, when you tip a site which includes TipTheWeb author information in its pages, you’ll be able to tell that the Tip will be routed directly to the author by looking at how the Tip is displayed— it will be marked with an Author icon, and hovering over that icon will show you the author’s name or ID:

For Publishers:

Setting up a website to work with TipTheWeb as a multi-author site only involves adding a single additional piece of information to your pages — a URL representing the author of that page — and doesn’t require any custom JavaScript or any programatic interaction with TipTheWeb. In fact, the format of this data isn’t even proprietary or unique to TipTheWeb. Instead, we built this feature around a seldom-used standard, a rel="author"-type link element that you add to the head element of your HTML pages, like this:

<head>
    <title>A Page By Dave On Example.com</title>
    <link rel="author" href="http://twitter.com/davefogel" title="Dave" />
</head>

In the above example, we identify the author of the page by his twitter profile, but you can use any URL which refers to a site that the author could claim through TipTheWeb, like their personal website. (We are also working on a small additional feature that will let you use an author’s OpenID instead.) You can find more detailed information in our multi-author docs.

What Kind of Websites Should Use TipTheWeb’s Multi-Author Support?

While the decision to delegate incoming Tips to a site’s contributors is up to the website’s publisher, we think that most sites that work as a platform for their members to contribute or share content would be good candidates. In addition to multi-author blogs (which is what we get asked about the most), we think that, for example, recipe sites, media-sharing sites, how-to sites, art sites, product review sites, as well as news and magazine-style sites would all work best if integrated with TipTheWeb’s multi-author support.

Let us know what you think!

Support for multi-author websites is brand-new, so we’d like to hear what you think about it. Will you use it in your site? Let us know by sending email to feedback@tiptheweb.org

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