Emptyeye

Recently, Twitch.TV switched to a new layout that utilizes a language called Markdown in lieu of HTML. What this means is that my previous post on this topic is now outdated. I’ll leave it up for archival purposes, but obviously some things have changed with Twitch’s newest update.

Note that this update applies only to Twitch.TV specifically. Justin.TV may well work the same as before, but as I’ve moved over to Twitch.TV, I can’t say for sure (Both sites are owned by the same company, but are now effectively two different services outside of their chat servers).

The good news is that actually getting the button to work is quite easy with the new Twitch layout.

With that, let’s get started.

First, log into your paypal and actually get your Paypal donation link. To do this, log into PayPal, then go to Merchants and Services. Under “Create Buttons”, select the button of your choice. NOTE: Since I wrote the previous version of this guide, Paypal has since added a clause basically saying “If you use a donation button, you’d better be ready to verify that you’re putting your money toward a cause.” In light of that, you probably don’t want to use the “Donation” option anymore. Go through all the options, presumably using the “Customize Text or Appearance” option (If you’re not using a custom image, you’re probably better off just using ChipIn), and save the button at the end.

This will yield something like this (Replace all square brackets with braces):
[form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"]
[input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"]
[input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="ABCDEFGHIJKLM"]
[input type="image" src="http://photobucket.com/miscellaneous/Donate%20Button%20Test.png" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!"]
[img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1"]
[/form]

I’ve bolded the first three lines of the above because those are the tags we’re concerned with.

Next, go to your Twitch.TV Administration page by clicking “Admin” near the top of your stream, then “Edit”. Click the giant plus sign to add a panel. In the title, put whatever you want the title of the panel to be–I simply use “Donate!” Select whatever image you want to use as your donation button–Twitch now lets you simply pull these from your computer, which is nice.

Now is when we’ll use those three pieces of information I bolded. Where it says “Image links to”, put the following: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ABCDEFGHIJKLM

As you can see, what we did was join those first three elements. We joined elements 1 and 2 with a question mark, elements 2 and 3 with an &, and within each element, we joined the variable name with its value via an equal sign.

Now just click “Submit” below the panel and that’s it, you now have a donation button!

Note that you may want to have a text link to the donation URL in another panel. You should have the basic idea of Twitch panel creation now, but the specific way to create a link that has text is [displayed text](https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ABCDEFGHIJKLM) . Don’t look at me, Markdown is wacky.

Hopefully that helps you with donation button creation!

-EE

NOTE 4/6/13: Twitch.TV has since changed their layout. I’ve kept the original post behind the “Read more” link, for archival purposes, but you’ll want to go here for actual current instructions.
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Just been busy with stuff–gaming, short story writing, and so on.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Gobble-Con starts today. If anyone is curious, my panel is tomorrow morning (Saturday) at 9AM, in what wrestling fans like to refer to as “The curtain-jerking slot” (I’m the first panel of the day), but which would more accurately be called “booze-induced sleepy time” (Thanks for the phrase dballin) if this convention succeeds in its goal of being a place where adult geeks can hang out. If nothing else, I’m not really competing with anything “big” the convention has to offer, which is a plus. If you’re in the Milford area, come check it out!

Some of the word counts, according to WordPress, of my post-convention posts:
MAGFest 8/The SDA Charity Marathon: 3631
Connecticon 2009: 4125
Game UniCon: 2315
MAGFest VII: 1379
Connecticon 2008: 2786
MAGFest VI:1578.

Yeah, I tend to write a lot about conventions. Connecticon 2010 will be no exception.

Indeed it does. Ideally, I’d like to have something resembling a very unfinished demo out by the end of April. Currently, I’m working on getting in the parts of the overworld needed to finish the first “quest” you’re sent on in the game. There’s a lot of other stuff to take care of, too (Properly implementing spells, for one, and really anything besides just “Attack” in combat for another), but that’s where it’s easiest to find tangible progress.

The somewhat good news on that front–and I say “somewhat” because I’m a terrible enough programmer that I made the pseudo-mistake in the first place–is that I saved myself a couple hundred lines of code by realizing I was making a redundant setting of room coordinates…after you were already in the room. I tried removing that second set, and everything seems to be in working order, which is nice.

In less mitigated good news, I quickly threw together an unstable-but-works-for-my-purposes location debugger, in short allowing me to teleport to any square on the map rather than having to walk there manually. This almost immediately paid dividends as I quickly realized that, due to my sloppy coding, I was changing monster regions quicker than I should have been. The “unstable” part comes from the fact that the debugger–and the entire game–crashes when you feed it input it doesn’t expect (IE anything other than a number). Again, though, since I’m currently the only one using it, I’m not overly concerned about that.

That’s been my main project of late.

You know, for as much as people rag on George W. Bush (Deservedly so at points), I’m pretty sure he didn’t flub the Inauguration Oath either time he took office like I just watched Obama do (If anyone has footage proving me wrong, please provide it, I’d like to see).

Hopefully this was a one-off, caught up in the moment thing, and we didn’t all misoverestimate (As Dubya might say) Obama.

He was a Japanese guy in Sayonara. He did commercials for the Chrysler Cordoba in the ’70s. More recently, he was the grandfather in the Spy Kids movies, and the voice of Senor Senior Sr. on Kim Possible. He’s probably best known as Mr. Rourke on Fantasy Island.

To me, though, he’ll always be Khan.

Montalban was 88.

That’s really all I wanted to say. A big post-MAGFest update will be coming. Really.

With the popularity of The Comics Curmudgeon, one thing that people have realized is that the traditional “Funny” comic strips you see in newspapers aren’t really that funny at all. For the real wackiness, you actually have to look at the daily “serial strips” that try to tell an ongoing plot.

It seems counter-intuitive, but actually try following one for a few weeks and you’ll more than likely see what I mean. In the past, I’ve discussed Gil Thorp as one such example, but today I’d like to show you another example: The daily version of “The Amazing Spider-Man”. Let’s take a look at the strips for December 18th and 19th, shall we?
First, the strip for Thursday, December 18th.

The hard way, huh?

Let’s start at the second panel and work backwards on this one. The villain, a man calling himself “Big Time” who has an obsessions with clocks (The concept can work–the Batman: The Animated Series version of The Clock King was actually pretty freakin’ cool), says to his fake-Spider-Man accomplice, a guy named “Lefty”, that it’s time to do things the hard way, pulling out a gun as he does so. And what, you ask, was “the easy way” that his Plan B of “Shooting my enemies” is so much harder than?

Did you guess “Trying to drop a giant clock on my ex-wife, the execution of which involves luring said ex-wife (A woman named Maria Lopez, by the way) to the clock and having her stand directly under said clock for about 25 minutes, not taking so much as one step in any direction?” If so, congrats, have a giant clock-shaped cookie.

Yeah. How shooting her would have been harder than an elaborate plan of which your average 1940s movie villain would be proud is beyond me.

So what about Thursday’s first panel? Well, Spider-Man is stopping the aforementioned giant clock from crashing into a wall. Said giant clock has J. Jonah Jameson, Maria’s current lover (And nemesis to Spider-Man) tied up on the back of it. For sheer insanity factor, this pretty much speaks for itself, but if you really want the whole story, go here and click on the entries from the bottom up, starting with “In Which Jonah Gets Punched in the Face“.

Now for Friday, December 19th.

This man hasn't been paying attention for the past 3 weeks or so.

No “man tied to giant rolling clock” antics this time around, sadly, although you’ll note that Spider-Man is just standing around in a heroic pose despite a complete failure to this point to apprehend Big Time (Or even locate him for that matter) in panel 1. Again, though, panel 2 is really the kicker here. Lefty heroically rams into Big Time, causing his shot to go astray. Why? Because he doesn’t want to be an accessory to murder. This would be fine, if he hadn’t already been very close to being an accessory to murder twice over (1. Dropping giant clock on boss’s ex-wife. 2. I’m guessing Jonah was not supposed to survive the fall either), and stood by and did nothing about it. To be fair, in one of the Sunday strips, Lefty/fake Spider Man thought bubbles about how he’s about to become an accessory to murder, but…suffice to say that even earlier than this, Lefty knows perfectly well what’s going on and goes along with it. Others have theorized that the reason for this is that he knew there was no chance of the giant-clock-on-woman gambit actually working, but now that the guns are out, it’s serious. And really, this is about the only thing that even makes sense.

So there you have it. You have to go to the “serious” strips for the real laughs. Remember this.