On my radar these days is the mantra progress over perfection.
With that said, here are the June updates for Web Monetization (WM).
Advocacy
May
On May 13th, PPK (Peter-Paul Koch) gave a talk about WM at the Beyond Tellerrand Conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. About 30 people attended in-person, some of whom remembered Coil positively. PPK noticed that describing the WM extension as being "like Coil, but using your own real money" made the concept clearer.
Alex and Ioana, both from the ILF Tech Team also attended the event. What impressed Ioana most was the creativity around the event, and the diversity of the talks, from truly deep-tech to font discussions.
June
Santosh, one of our Open Source Ambassadors, virtually joined the JSNation conference on June 17th, giving a talk about WM, and sharing a sneak peek of our open source Web Monetization extension (WM ext). The conference topics were broad, including the latest trends in JavaScript, soft-skills insights, with participation from core contributors of major open source and web projects.
Ioana, our Engineering Manager joined the sister event, C3 Dev Festival (Code, Career, Creativity), also in Amsterdam. She was part of the committee deciding on the schedule and the talks.
WM Extension
On May 24th, we released the alpha 1 build of the WM ext 🎉!
Here is what the team completed in the 6 weeks leading up to the alpha release:
| Impacts payments |
|---|
| Send a one-time payment to a web monetized (WMized) website. |
| Correctly start, stop, and resume continuous WM payments to a monetized website. |
| Stop monetization for unfocused browser windows and remove the receiving wallet details when a tab gets closed. |
| For each web monetized iframe on a website, the extension inspects only the header of each iframe, finds the first WM link tag, and equally divides the WM payment between the total number of receiving wallets on the website, including its iframes. |
| Impacts what we see |
|---|
| Display a different extension icon based on whether a web monetized or non-WMized website is visited. |
| Support for any currency that is supported by the connected digital wallet, to a maximum precision of 9 decimal places (i.e. the maximum asset scale is 9). |
| Format and display amounts: a. Fiat currencies display 2 decimal places (e.g. ZAR 10.95 or EUR 0.53). b. Scientific notation is displayed for an amount smaller than 1, when the currency has an asset scale higher than 4 (e.g. BTC 8.9e-6). c. Otherwise the entire amount gets displayed (e.g. TSZ 1568.961234). |
| Impacts configuration |
|---|
| Allow users to disable making continuous payments with the extension: a. When disabled, only send one-time payments to WMized websites. b. When enabled, send one-time payments, and also make continuous WM payments based on the configured hourly rate. |
| We removed the global setting that had made it possible to completely disable the extension as this is existing functionality that is already built into Web browsers. |
Testing
We have been lucky to have about 12 early users, including an 8-year old cutie, begin to test the extension. Thank you for your efforts and feedback, team!
Keep an eye on the bugs that we're working on here.
Remember, progress over…😉
Top comments (3)
Love the mantra for these days! It will empower others to break the perfection barrier for sure! Thanks for sharing it, Tseli! <3
Nice!!!
Love that these updates are coming to this space!