Overview
Our Twitter integration is live today; it allows kachingle.com, each Medallion, and every Kachingler to tweet automatically.
Users need to link their Twitter accounts to their Kachingler account and Medallion(s). Details below.
These principles guided our design and implementation:
- tweet conservatively – e.g. at the beginning err on the side of fewer tweetable events rather than bombard Twitterville with automated tweets
- use the Kachingler’s @twitterusername when available
- integrate just enough to be interesting and give us a platform from which we can learn and get your input on how we should enhance the functionality
The Kachingle Online Community Meeting on September 16, 2010 will be devoted to a discussion of our Twitter integration.
Twitter integration: Three different types of Twitter streams
- @kachinglecom – our own Twitter account for the website Kachingle.com
- the Twitter account for any Medallion (but first must be turned on by the Medallion owner in the Manage section of “Sites I Own”)
[Example: @bunnyk9]
- the Twitter account for any Kachingler (but first must be turned on by the Kachingler in the Settings page)
[Example: @typaldos]
Quick overview showing these tweets all together: Twitter search on “kachingle“.
Note that each connection to Twitter can be done to a different Twitter account. For instance, a user who has both a Kachingler account and has two Medallions could connect each to a different Twitter account (e.g. 3 different Twitter accounts).
- when a new Medallion is verified (e.g. when a new site or blog or application signs up for Kachingle)
- when a Kachingler turns on any Medallion (unless done anonymously)
Any Medallion (two types of tweets):
Note: Tweeting must be turned on by the Medallion owner in the Manage section of “Sites I Own”
- when a Kachingler turns on this Medallion to support it
- when this Medallion’s monthly payment is made (and the total amount of payments is equal or greater to $3.35 — the price of a grande iced latte at Starbucks in Silicon Valley, CA)
Any Kachingler (two types of tweets):
Note: Tweeting must turned on by the user in the settings page
- when this Kachingler turns on a Medallion to support it
- when this Kachingler’s monthly payment is distributed
One of the most frequently requested enhancements we’ve received since opening Kachingle has been for a Medallion style smaller than the two we offered. Jazz, at a petite 61 x 61 pixels, is just that. This style fits well into blocks where you may already have other social media buttons for a post, article, video or other single piece of digital stuff; here on the Kachingle blog we put it at the top of each post, right under the title.
To use this style just look at your current Medallion code block for the part that says either stylename='wide' or stylename='narrow' and change either wide or narrow to Jazz.
Alternatively the Add and Manage Medallion pages (and the WordPress plugin) have been updated so you can choose your preferred styles and get a whole new Medallion code block for your site.
Say Bye to Wide and Narrow
At the same time we retired the names wide and narrow. While accurate relative to each other, with Jazz that’s no longer true.
Plus those names have no style or fun—and style and fun are important to us! So from now on the style previously known as wide is now called Classical and narrow is now Neoclassical.
Don’t worry: The old style names still work, will continue to do so for a long time and you don’t need to make any changes to your Medallion code. You can change them if you like but it isn’t necessary.
Last week we launched goodies.kachingle.com, a home for tools you can use to enhance the Kachingle experience on your site. Goodies opens with two tools:
- Who’s Kachingling Whom: This widget shows you the most recent Kachingling activity in our system at the moment your page is loaded, including the Kachingler’s name and avatar and the Medallion’s name and logo.
- Kachingle Medallion WordPress Plugin: This plugin enables you to add a Kachingle Medallion to your (self-hosted) WordPress blog and includes a Who’s Kachingling Whom widget you can drag into your sidebar.
Who’s Kachingling Whom Live Demo
V1.4 of Kachingle’s WordPress plugin has been released. Additions include support for the new small (61×61 pixels) Jazz Medallion and a Who’s Kachingling Whom widget. Both can be seen right here on the Kachingle blog: the Jazz Medallion is at the top of each post, under the title, and a Who’s Kachingling Whom widget is in the right sidebar.
In order to create more flexibility we’ve created a range of nicknames for the different Medallion styles. The original 230px wide Medallion is now called Classical, the narrow 160px wide Medallion is now called Neoclassical and Jazz is 61px. For the WordPress plugin both the old and new names work interchangeably.
If you’ve already installed the plugin you should see an upgrade available notice in your WordPress Dashboard. To install and start using it now use the automated WordPress plugin installation process:
- Go to the Add Plugin screen on your blog’s Admin page
- Enter ‘Kachingle Medallion’ into the search field
- When the results are shown click the Install link and complete the wizard steps
- Be sure you activate the plugin afterwards
Since this blog is a place for us to demonstrate our technology as well as a communications channel we’ll sometimes do things a normal user wouldn’t. In this case I’m referring to having a Jazz Medallion and a Neoclassical Medallion in every post; I don’t think anyone else would do this.
Changelog:
- Added support for the new, smaller Jazz Medallion style
- Renamed narrow and wide Medallion styles to neoclassical and classsical, respectively (the old style names will continue to work for backwards compatibility)
- Removed the allowtransparency=”true” attribute and the text only seen by browsers which do not support iFrames from the generated Medallion HTML
- Added the Who’s Kachingling Whom widget
Recently the German community of the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia started a discussion about implementing a social payment service like Kachingle. Some people argue whether it should be placed on articles or on user sites and if the revenue should flow to authors or to the Wikimedia foundation. In a running survey Wikipedia contributors are voting on how this is going to proceed.
We think social payments and a crowdsourced knowledge platforms like Wikipedia are a perfect match! Kachingle’s activity-based model of calculating payouts ensures a fair share of revenue. Further this system compliments Wikipedia’s ongoing fundraising activities—just as our service co-exists nicely with advertising it would do the same with donations.
The idea of a global system like Wikimedia adopting a social payment system like Kachingle is very exciting and shows that our vision and implementation are going down the right road!
Hathor the Cowgoddess and Mama Is are the homes for Heather Cushman-Dowdee’s web comics. Heather—who will be a special guest at this Thursday’s online Kachingle Community meetings—has enthusiastically signed up for Kachingle as a new support tool for her creativity and introduced us to her readers this way:
Now, here’s the fun part. Kachingle is Brand NEW. There are only a few sites that are kachingle-able. I’m now one of them. The top site on the Kachingle site has 87 people kachingling them. I want, even for a brief day or two to be the number one site. Will you help me? Join Kachingle, and kachingle me. Then talk all of your friends into kachingling me too, the first month of kachingle is a trial period, you can always quit if you don’t like it. And hey, list your site on kachingle also, I’ll kachingle you back!
We’ve implemented our second social widget on Kachingle.com: “Who’s Most Like Me Here“, a.k.a. WMLMH.
Our first social widget is the one here on the right “Who’s Kachingling Whom” ->
Our new WMLMH widget displays to Kachinglers who they are most similar to with respect to other Kachinglers on a particular site or blog.
For example, on “Carta” and on “Mama is…” my soulmates are:
Cynthia’s WMLMH on Carta
Cynthia’s WMLMH on Mama is…
I can use this information to find other blogs or sites that are likely to be appealing to me.
For instance, if I click on the link to Heather Cushman-Dowdee I go to her “Sites I Visit” page and discover additional great content that I wasn’t aware of such as “Hathor the Cowgoddess“.
So, all Kachinglers can do the same exploration by visiting the pages for the sites or blogs they are kachingling at Kachingle.com. Just go to www.kachingle.com and either find the sites you are kachingling thru a search of AllSites, or simply login and you will be placed on your “Sites I Visit” page.
We are eager to get feedback from Kachinglers on the WMLMH widget so that we can improve and expand it. Right now the matching algorithm is quite simple — we will make it more comprehensive in the future. And most importantly we will productize the widget so that Kachingle-enabled sites and blogs can place it right next to their Medallion.
There’s so much going on that we’ve haven’t had much time to blog. We’ve got a long list of topics to blog about:
- Named Medallions (you can see them here on our blog!) which make it easy to have multiple authors/sections on a site or blog each have their own Medallion
- Lots of new press and articles about Kachingle and social payments (see the left-margin of the blog for some of the most recent)
- New widgets
- New features
- Twitter application in beta; full version rolling out shortly
- Lots of new new Sites (Medallions) participating
- New online community forum
- Upcoming online community meeting August 19
But, I decided that in any case I should try to blog once or twice a month about general stuff rather than specifics to give you all an idea of what we are thinking and doing here at Kachingle. And we hope to get some feedback from you!
What I’m going to blog about today is the focus of Kachingle, the PayPal problem we have in Germany, and the “social” power of “social payments”.
Continue reading →
Our Medallion engineer, Sharon, solved a tricky CSS3 problem regarding text truncation. She just started her blog, In Silico, and shared what she discovered in a recent blog post. All nitty gritty engineers are invited to review and comment!
CSS3 text truncation and ellipses: even in Firefox, and without the styling constraints
