A new Y-Combinator company called TipJoy is having a stab at the micropayments problem.

This has been tried before with varying amounts of success, but this might be the company to do it. Equally they may sink without trace. I've decided to give them a go, however, so that's what the green button currently on the top-left of the banner of these pages is about.

At the moment I have a few quibbles. I've raised these via their feedback, so we'll have to see if they get addressed or not (see updates):

The text is ungrammatical

Currently it reads "Like this? Leave a (tip this)" where the parenthetical part is the text on the button. By omitting the "Leave a" they can fix this as far as I'm concerned. Update: I've added a screen capture of the button as it appears on my browser so that you can see the effect if it's a rendering bug, if they fix it, or if I choose to remove it in future.

Perhaps they want control over the text - but that seems like a futile goal to me, and more likely to cause problems (what about multi-lingual websites?) for legitimate users than hinder conmen trying to trick people into clicking the button.

Update: After another update from TipJoy I gather that this is indeed a rendering bug. Presumably it will softly and silently go away when they deduce the origin (assuming it's not something I've brought upon myself). I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Kubuntu (KDE 3.5.8)

Update: And after another update that's now fixed. They've added sans-serif as a fall-back font in their stylesheet. Initially they were assuming that Verdana would be generally available.

The font details are not readily changeable

The text is black. My banner is purple (don't ask). The two do not work well together.

Update: The nice thing about start-ups is that they're responsive. I've just had an email back from Tipjoy letting me know that you can add the &bg=dark option to the tipjoy URL to render this with light text instead of dark text. It looks better now. The other caveats stand however, and I've added the following new concern.

Update: The rendering is noticeable

I don't like pages that don't render damn quickly. Tipjoy takes an appreciable amount of time to render its frame. Seeing the "google analytics" stuff waiting to render does not make me happy. I really, really want static content coming from my own site here UNLESS the user clicks the button. This could be enough to kill the concept for me, but fingers crossed they'll address this before I remove tipjoy.

Update: They're aware of this issue and will be addressing at least some aspects of it.

The banner is obtrusive

This is the least obtrusive button they had that's still visible (there's another approach that they provide, but I'd rather be overt about this). Ideally I would like just the star and I'd add it to the other icons on the top right of the page. A happy medium for me would be just the button.

Yuk. IFRAME.

I don't like IFRAMEs and I don't much like using Javascript to render page content. This has both (although the latter is optional I think). I can live with that, but I'd rather just put a link on the page that interested parties can click. I don't mind if they leave the page; my readers are astute enough to use tabbed browsing.

It's all about control

I can probably fix all of these problems with a certain amount of hacking - but this shouldn't be my problem. I'm the customer driving revenue to them - if they can't let me fix all of these things with a bare minimum of effort, I won't bother. After all, I had a blog without tipping before, I can have a blog without tipping in the future. It's not necessary to me, nor I suspect to most of the target "tipping" audience. Until "tip spam" starts to become the norm anyway. What internet technology can't be abused by spammers, after all?

Despite my carping I admire anyone doing a startup, especially in this sort of space where you're trapped between reluctant customers and suffocating red tape. I'll give them a try for a week, or maybe a month. But I write this blog primarily for my own benefit; getting tips would be a nice bonus but it's not essential.

Update 1: It looks like the tip link will stay as they've now addressed most of the major issues with it. All I have to do now is cross my fingers and hope people sometimes click it.

Update 2: And now it has gone. Firstly some sort of issue on their server combined with the Javascript required to add the button caused delays when loading my page. That's an absolute no-no. You must not make your customers look bad - and a long pause while their content loads does just that. Secondly, nobody (except Dave Wood - hi Dave and thanks!) ever clicked the thing, so it was a bit pointless keeping it. Never mind, and nice try. I still wish them luck, but I'm no longer going to be participating.