A simpler alternative to rel-payment

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:16:00 +0100

The previous screencast may have tried to use too much technology to enable user-centric simple web payments.

After looking around some, it occurred to me that the rel-payment microformat is not sweeping the world wide web. Using the Internet Archives, I found a blog post from July 2005 that announced support for rel-payment on blip.tv. I’m guessing not many people used this before it was abandoned.

An alternative to rel-payment is to simply use a convention. For instance, the path /blog is a convention to quickly find the blog for a site. On Twitter, this would normally represent the person with the Twitter handle “blog” but Twitter follows the convention and redirects to blog.twitter.com.

OpenTransact: rel-payment and OpenID

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 06:36:00 +0100

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEe9dg5gRI&hl=en&fs=1]

Warning: I boosted the microphone amp on this one. :)

A blog is a great place to accept web payments. Livejournal, blogger and wordpress allow bloggers to make their blog url their OpenID. In this screencast, we see that when a blogger on Wordpress.com adds links, she can easily associate the type of link (through microformats). One microformat is rel-payment:

RelPayment is a microformat for making exchanges of support (be it financial or otherwise) possible. By adding rel=“payment” to a hyperlink a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink provides a way to show or give support for the current page. For example to give financial support to the owner of the current page.

Microformats on Open Source Currency

A simpler alternative to rel-payment

OpenTransact: rel-payment and OpenID