So let’s get started. The first step is to get the button from PayPal. To do this, log into PayPal, then go to Merchants and Services. Under “Create Buttons”, select the button of your choice–probably a “Donate” button. 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]

Now, as mentioned, Justin/Twitch don’t support the “Form” tag, so we’ll have to do some converting to turn this into a regular clickable image. We want to turn the above into this (Again, replace all square brackets with braces):
[a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ABCDEFGHIJKLM" target="_blank"][img src="http://photobucket.com/miscellaneous/Donate%20Button%Test.png" alt="Donate! Thanks very much!" title="Donate! Thanks very much!" /][/a]

Put the above into your “Long Bio” section on Twitch, and you should see the button next time you load your stream!

If you’re curious as to the nuts and bolts of this, here it is, line by line.
[a: Open a link tag.

rel="nofollow": Tells search engines not to influence the target link's search engine ranking.

href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ABCDEFGHIJKLM": The target URL we're linking to. What we've done is taken the first three attributes of the form tag and converted them to one URL. the ? after webscr says "Hey here are some attributes and what their values should be." hosted_button_id points at your specific PayPal; I'm honestly not totally sure what the cmd is all about.

target="_blank"]: Opens a new window when the person clicks to donate. Useful! You don’t want them leaving your stream altogether, after all.

[img src="http://photobucket.com/miscellaneous/Donate%20Button%Test.png": img src says "Hey take this image and actually display it." What comes after that is the location of your image. I used a simple Photobucket address here; you can put the image on any of a number of image upload sites. Alternately, you can put it on your own website if you have one (My actual donation button is hosted here on emptyeye.com.). You may have noticed that we haven't closed the link tag as yet; this is because we want to image to effectively be the link, as opposed to just having text there.

alt="Donate! Thanks very much!": If something goes wrong with the image, or if the person uses a screen reader, they'll see/hear the alt text instead of the image. You can change this text to whatever you want, this is just what I chose. IE versions prior to 8 will also display this text if you hover over the image (This is actually not what the tag was designed for).

title="Donate! Thanks very much!": This, in contrast, is the tag designed to display text when you hover over the image. Putting it here will cause the text to display when you hover over the image in standards-compliant browsers (Firefox, IE8+, etc.)

/]: Closes the image tag

[/a]: Closes the link tag.

Note that you should probably have a text link as well, in case there’s an issue with the image. To do this, just use the above, but replace everything starting with “[img src…” with the text you want the link to display.

My thanks go to bgeorge in this topic on Twitch.TV’s Support Discussions; I modified his solution there to get my own button up and running, and essentially just generalized this instructions to create this guide.

-EE

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

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.

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

To me, though, he’ll always be Khan.

Montalban was 88.

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.

That is all.