Snippets

Site Monetization with Coil

I’ve tried a handful of websites based on “tip with micropayments” in the past. They come and go. That’s fine. From a publisher perspective, it’s low-commitment. I’ve never earned a ton, but it was typically enough to be worth it.

Now Bruce has me trying Coil. It’s compelling to me for a couple reasons:

  • The goal is to make it based on an actual web standard(!)
  • Coil is nicely designed. It’s the service that readers actually subscribe to and a browser extension (for Chrome and Firefox) that pays publishers.
  • The money ends up in a Stronghold account1. I don’t know much about those, but it was easy enough to set up and is also nicely designed.
  • Everything is anonymous. I don’t have access to, know anything about, or store anything from the users who end up supporting the site with these micropayments.
  • Even though everyone is anonymous, I can still do things for the supporters, like not show ads.

px2svg: convert raster images to SVG

Turning raster images into SVG files, one pixel at a time. Yes, really.

What?

The PHP accepts a raster image (GIF, PNG, JPEG, that sort of thing) and creates an SVG image that recreates the raster image. It does this by drawing filled rectangles to recreate the pixels in the image. In many cases, this is literally a 1-by-1 rectangle, but it will check for runs of similar color (similar to GIF compression) and create one rectangle per run. It checks both horizontal and vertical runs to see which approach is more efficient, and returns the better option.

The script requires GD.

Why?

There are situations where people want to take small bitmaps—think primary-color buttons or badges—and make them scalable while still preserving their 8-bit appearance. See, for example, Joe Crawford’s post about upscaling a minitag. For those cases, this script will enable a quick conversion to SVG with at least some minimal attempts at optimization.

This all originally started as a one-off experiment and a bit of a jape. You can see the original at flaming-shame, if you fancy a laugh.