Apr 26
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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Mar 22
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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Mar 22
At TipTheWeb, our most important goal is to make tipping as easy as possible. In particular, people should be able to tip stuff they like while browsing the web, without disrupting their flow or distracting them from what they’re doing. That’s why we created the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet, a special link you can save to your bookmarks bar and which lets you tip the page you’re on.
A New Look and New Features
Until now, using the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet would just create a new “unfunded” Tip in your account. (Unfunded Tips are like drafts- only you can see them). To fund your Tips, you still had to go to your Tips page on your account and click one or more fund buttons. While this works okay, we found ourselves always wishing we could fund our Tips right away, and we received feedback from users that they want this too. So the new Tip Anywhere experience now allows you to choose to fund your new Tip right away, or wait until later:
The funding feature is especially useful for people who want their Tip Stream feed updated right when they tip.
Sharing Your Tips
If you like something enough to tip it, chances are that you might want to share a link to that content with your friends. So we’ve added a new feature directly to the Tip Anywhere widget where you can share your Tip (and the link it refers to) on Facebook and Twitter:
Not only will your friends or followers benefit from seeing the link, but they might be encouraged to tip it as well, which increases support for the publisher of that content, and helps spread the word about TipTheWeb.
Improved Mobile Experience
We’ve vastly improved the experience of using the Tip Anywhere Bookmarklet in the browser on your iOS or Android device. We’ve now included special instructions for installing the bookmarklet in iOS (which is significantly harder than in a regular browser), and on devices with smaller screens, we’ve changed the flow so you see the Tip Widget in full screen mode:
Let Us Know What You Think
We think every TipTheWeb user should be using the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet to create their tips- it’s so much easier than copying and pasting links, and it fits with our vision that people should tip stuff right when they’ve found it and gotten value from it. So we’d love to hear your feedback about the new bookmarklet, and any ideas about how it could work better. Let us know at feedback@tiptheweb.org
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