Grassroots Economy Festival - Oakland, CA.

"An alternative grassroots economy already exists in the Bay Area." - Mira Luna

A simpler alternative to rel-payment

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.

Similarly, url paths that began with /transacts (or something similar) would be a lot more user friendly than using a microformat. Now we can use a simpler bookmarklet and achieve the same flexibility as rel-payment. A convention like this would be compatible with OpenTransact.

OpenTransact: rel-payment and OpenID

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.

The opentransact payment in the screencast is made with this bookmarket.

Although Wordpress.com has the XFN microformats enabled, the rel-payment microformat is not enabled.

Update 3:15pm: BTW, this screencast is part of a conversation started by Guillaume Lebleu on an Agile Banking mailing list thread.

Simple Web Payments with OpenID and OpenTransact

This screencast shows how simple web payments can be using OpenTransact. Instead of making a payment to an email address, we can make a payment to a URL, particularly if it is an OpenID.

The person making the payment simply adds a delicious-style bookmarklet and as you can see below, I simply re-used the javascript code for bookmarking a url on delicious and pointed it to a oscurrency financial service provider hosted on heroku.

javascript:(function(){f = 'http://high-ocean-79.heroku.com/transacts/new?to=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);a = function(){if( !window.open(f,'opentransact', 'location=yes,links=no,scrollbars=no,toolbar=no,width=550,height=550') ) location.href=f};if( /Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent) ){setTimeout(a,0)}else{a()}})()