User Friendly Website for a Larger Audience

[abnor]

In order to gain a wider audience outside of just open source programmers, we HAVE to make it friendly to other demographics! This includes:

• connecting with other websites (deviantart.com, linkedin.com etc.) to allow users to create a gittip profile.
• creating more ways to (receive) pay. The easiest sounds like getting in touch with Paypal to implement some widgets or whatever programs necessary to create a smoother flow of money.
• allow users to express their desires/goals through their profile page, which may involve simply linking to other websites/blogs to allow previews of their work, or to create submission forms/boxes of their photos/statements.

Here is a scratch example. The blank space could be used for photos or previews of other sites.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1SLYvOJJVoVMWlYMzVBVlZ5SzQ/edit?usp=sharing

[chadwhitacre]

cc: @hurlothrumbo

[chadwhitacre]

(@abnor P.S. If you add a space between the - and the first word then GitHub turns it into a HTML list for you.)

• connecting with other websites (deviantart.com, linkedin.com etc.) to allow users to create a gittip profile.

Yes! This is what we refer to elsewhere as /on/elsewhere/, like https://www.gittip.com/on/twitter/BarackObama/. Right now we have 2 of these (/on/twitter/... and /on/github/...). There's a ticket (#505) to refactor the python and templating code underneath this to make it much easier to add an unlimited number of these.

• creating more ways to (receive) pay. The easiest sounds like getting in touch with Paypal to implement some widgets or whatever programs necessary to create a smoother flow of money.

PayPal payouts are ticketed as #63.

• allow users to express their desires/goals through their profile page, which may involve simply linking to other websites/blogs to allow previews of their work, or to create submission forms/boxes of their photos/statements.

I believe this is what is aimed at with the "redesign profile page to tell a story" ticket (#133). Eh?

[chadwhitacre]

@abnor If these points are adequately addressed in other tickets, can I let you close this ticket? I appreciate that you're diving in head first with GitHub and opening tickets. I don't want to discourage you, but I do want to make sure we don't end up with unnecessary duplicates in the system. :)

[abnor]

That's perfectly fine. No offensive taken. Just still trying to orient myself :P In my own brain old to-do lists are replaced with new to-do lists, but this is your brain, not mine :D

[abnor]

Erm, how do I close it by myself? :P

[chadwhitacre]

@abnor Can you close now that you're a collaborator on the repo?

[abnor]

Done :]

[lyndsysimon]

Welcome aboard, @abnor!

[abnor]

Thankie :D

[abnor]

Notes:

http://whit537.org/2013/01/disappointed-with-gittip.html

Improved Profiles—The goal is for your Gittip profile to tell a story about how you’re making the world better. Right now it’s static and simple. We want to make it more dynamic (without over-doing it) so your patrons can keep in touch with your goals and progress.

Community Pages—The plan is to give you UI on your Gittip profile to opt in to various communities. That is, you’ll be able to tag yourself with “jquery,” “front-end,” etc. Then we’ll have a page at:

https://www.gittip.com/communities/jquery/

that serves as a dashboard for everyone in that community, with leaderboards, etc., such as are on the homepage (in minimal form) right now.

Funds—Think mutual funds. So you’ll have your own “jQuery” fund that is a weighted list of people in the community that you think do great work. Then someone from the outside who uses jQuery but doesn’t necessarily know the ins and outs can direct money to your fund, and it will be shared accordingly. Funds will go on the community pages so people can find them easily.