The Pitch for LNCal.com
šļø LNCal allows you to register with LNUrl-Auth or your email address in under 30 seconds, and gives you the ability to create and share your public calendar where your clients can book you and pay your hourly rate in bitcoin immediately, to confirm the booking. You can also integrate with Google Calendar so that all your Google Calendar events will show as non-bookable times on your LNCal.
This project was created because I wanted to learn more about Lightning and also contribute in the Bitcoin community which I have been following from the sidelines for years.
I also wanted to give people a new way to earn and have access to bitcoins more easily, which I believe is the most important thing we could work on at the moment.
The project has been active for over 4 months to date and has over 250 activated users (nearly 800 considering the unverified ones) and our users have received more than 100 paid bookings.
It has been well received by the community and is currently actively used by few 'famous' bitcoiners like Giacomo Zucco, Gigi, Kevin Rooke and Daniel Prince.
Also we have been added on the App list of the Breez wallet, so you can sign-up with 1 click from inside the app.
I built this project alone, using Javascript and PHP. I used Polar and LND to learn how to integrate with Lightning and BTCPay Server for on-chain payments. I also created an open-source package to integrate LNUrl-Auth in your PHP project, which didn't exist before: https://github.com/eza/lnurl-php
I am currently working on:
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a facelift of the booking page (see cover of the article), to give it an even more PRO look&feel,
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also working on automated withdrawals to your Lightning Address when set.
The future reserves many more third party integrations (i.e. Zoom, CalDav), Paid Messages and many exciting new features!
Links:
š https://lncal.com/giacomozucco (example page)
š„ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXsAHNclU3k (Bolt Fun - Meet the Maker interview)