We are BIG hyped, not just hyped, about publicly announcing the beta release of the Web Monetization browser extension on March 24th! And, because good things come in threes, the extension was accompanied by a more extensive docs site, and a beta release of tools for Web Monetization publishers. Yeah! 💃🎉
📣 Community and Dev Advocacy
@ppk began a series of small, informal user interviews in March, talking to developers in India, Europe, and North America that want to start using Web Monetization. The goal of the interviews has been to discover pain points and anything that has been unclear about Web Monetization. We want to know how to improve information flow and to make resources more meaningful.
What would you like to better understand about Web Monetization?
🧰 Publisher tools
We released a collection of tools, still in beta, to support content owners or publishers, and developers to web monetize their work. You can:
- Use the Link generator to create the link tag to add to web pages you want to monetize.
- Create and add a banner to encourage your audience to support your work with Web Monetization.
What other tools would be useful to a content owner or developer starting to use Web Monetization?
📖 Documentation
Our revamped documentation site dedicates a section to content consumers, and to content owners. The goal is to make it easier to quickly find what you need. Plus, there is a treasure trove of developer resources. Learn how to link a wallet to monetize a web page. Explore tutorials on different ways websites can respond when receiving Web Monetization payments.
The Browser Extension
We had beta version releases on March the 3rd, 17th and 31st. The releases included performance boosts for faster response times. They also improved the user’s experience when getting started and fixed a few bugs.
🔧 Improvements
- Connect a wallet: We added a timeout to avoid getting stuck indefinitely if something goes wrong when you connect the extension to your wallet.
- Pay monetized pages: Embedding multimedia, forms or maps on your web page? We’ve improved how quickly the extension checks if a page is monetized, and how it handles content within those pages. This accurately calculates and distributes payments to all wallets, including those for embedded content.
- Smaller and faster: Improved how quickly the extension installs by replacing bulkier components with light-weight alternatives for the front-end. The extension should now feel more responsive, using less memory.
🐛 Bug Fixes
- Message displayed: When you open a blank tab or new window in a browser, the extension now recognizes an empty tab or new window consistently across all browsers. Previously, the extension displayed an incorrect message about browser internal pages for a new Firefox window.
- Unable to pay a web monetized site: Accurately detect situations where your extension’s wallet is unable to pay a website. For example, visiting a site that receives real money when your extension is connected to a test wallet that works with fake money. In this case, the extension icon must appear with an amber exclamation point. Opening the extension must display the message “This page cannot receive payments from your wallet at this time. Please check back later.”
What’s next?
- Building more tools to make it faster and simpler for publishers and owners of content to web monetize their work.
- Improving how the extension handles:
- Paying a site that has a large number of receiving wallets…stay tuned for more about why this matters.
- Paying a web monetized site that has embedded multimedia, maps or forms when the embedded item is also web monetized, with multiple receiving wallets of its own.
Before we go, listen up…we are still calling all developers, testers and technical writers to join the Web Monetization community!
Our work is open source. Our community calls are open to the public, and we'd love your contributions. Please connect with us in 3 places:
- This April we have Community Calls on the 10th and 24th. Check your timezone, and join on Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/fjy-vjef-ogj
- Contribute to these good-first-issues in the Web Monetization browser extension GitHub repo.
- Follow Web Monetization Publisher Tools on GitHub…we’ll soon have juicy good-first-issues for you to tackle.
Until next time.
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