We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the site’s design and layout. It strikes me as a notch too cluttered though, so I’ll be spending the next few weeks on our QA server trying new CSS designs and generally tidying up. I’ll be making headlines larger, simplifying the layout, and generally removing clutter.
If it looks nice, I’ll push the changes live. Stay tuned. 
Payment methods have always been a thorn in our sides. How do we let people post questions worth a quarter when merchant accounts and PayPal want to take $0.30 + 2.9% out of each and every transaction?
Sure, there are merchant accounts that offer lower fees, but with chargebacks, signup fees, gateway fees, monthly fees, kitten-kibble fees, etc etc, the $0.30 + 2.9% seemed like the most attractive option, at least to start. Since our fees are set at 18% per transaction (cheaper than anyone else doing this) and we offer 5% referral bonuses, we needed to be sure that we never paid more than 13% in total transaction fees. Of course, we’d only break-even on the transaction at that point… we’d still lose money given colocation, marketing, etc etc. $5 seemed to be the break-even point. At that point, PayPal took $0.30 plus ~$0.15… $0.45 or 9%. For transactions less than $5 we charged $0.50 to help us cover the transaction costs. Most people thought it was reasonable.
Imagine my surprise when I stumbled PayPal micropayments today. It’s buried on their site like a bone in a backyard. In fact, I didn’t even notice it on their site - I was submitting our RSS feeds using FeedShot and reading their blog when I discovered that this even existed.
This, of course, means big things for us. We’ll probably begin using PayPal micropayments and adjust our fees structure to pass the savings along to our users. Rather than have a $5 minimum funding or a $0.50 fee, I think we’ll switch to a $1.00 minimum funding without funding fees. Since most of our questions are in the $2-3 range, this seems awfully fair.
This is your typical, though practically obligatory, first post intended to introduce a blog and set some sort of flag on the vast expanses of the Internet.
It is a child building a castle on the beach, only to be washed away by the rising tides in an hour. It is a man building a cabin in the woods, only to have it burn in a decade. It is a scholar discovering a vast secret that will be irrelevant in a generation. It is a man planting a flag on a moon for a species and civilization that will destroy itself well before anything happens to the flag.
But I digress. What this is really about is the thoughts and ideas of three friends and a network of incredible people coming together to cast an idea in alginate, pouring in plastered-evenings of work, and seeing how the project comes out.
It’s been a lot of fun so far. We originated the idea about a year ago. Development began in 12/05, and we released the beast into the wild in 4/06. We’ve come a long way since then, especially considering the resources at our disposal.
So what might you expect from this blog? Expect commentary on development, ideas about what “web 2.0″ means, thoughts about academics and scholarship, and of course, kittens.
So, without further ado, permit me to reintroduce LILO, my tuxedo cat:
