Flattr for comments

You probably know already that my blog is using Flattr for micro-donation, both to the blog as a whole and to the single articles posted here. For those who don’t know, Flattr is a microdonation platform that splits a monthly budget into equal parts to share with your content creators of choice.

I’ve been using, and musing about, Flattr for a while and sometimes I ranted a little bit of how things have been moving in their camp. One of the biggest problems with the service is the relative scarce adoption. I’ve got a ton of “pending flattrs” as described on their blog for Twiter and Flickr users, mostly.

Riling up adoption of the service is key for it to be useful for both content creators and consumers: the former can only get something out of the system if their content is liked by enough people, and the latter will only care about adding money to the system if they find great content to donate to. Or if they use Socialvest to get the money while they spend it somewhere else.

So last night I did my part in trying to increase the usefulness of Flattr: I added it to the comments of my blog. If you do leave a comment and fill the email field, that email will be used, hashed, to create a new “thing” on Flattr, whether you’re already registered or not — if you’re not registered, the things will be kept pending until you register and associate the email address. This is not much different from what I’ve been doing already with gravatar, which uses the same method (the hashed email address).

Even though the description of the parameters needed to integrate Flattr for comments are described in the partnership interface there doesn’t seem to be a need to be registered as a partner – indeed you can see in the pages’ sources that there is no revenue key present – and assuming you already are loading the Flattr script for your articles’ buttons, all you have to add is the following code to the comment template (for Typo, other languages and engines will differ slightly of course!):

<% if comment.email != "" -%>




<% end -%>

Update (2017-07-20): No I’m not sure where the code ended up for this one, sorry 🙁

So if I’m not making money with the partner site idea, why am I bothering with adding these extra buttons? Well, I often had people help me out a lot in comments, pointing out obvious mistakes I made or things I missed… and I’d like to be able to easily thank the commenters when they help me out… and now I can. Also, since this requires a valid email field, I hope for more people to fill it in, so that I can contact them if I want to ask or tell them something in private (sometimes I wished to contact people who didn’t really leave an easy way to contact them).

At any rate, I encourage you all to read the comments on the posts, and Flattr those you find important, interesting or useful. Think of it like a +1 or a “Like”. And of course, if you’re not subscribed with Flattr, do so! You’ll never know what other people could like, that you posted!