Patreon Begging, Now With Three Levels

There was some bit of pride swallowing to launch a patreon begging button campaign, maybe with the idea I could solicit enough to devote maybe 1/3 my time to my tech projects.

Each ding is greatly appreciated, so far the monthly stream helps to pay the electric bill, or maybe 1 weeks worth of groceries. That helps.

I may have had grand dreams of building an Amanda Palmer like following in patreon, where she lists as 6th – my efforts have ranked somewhere a bit lower, like at 21,153rd

In setting up my patreon page, I resisted creating incentive levels, thinking (1) that’s what everyone else does; and (2) What happens if there is one level and people can choose to do more?

Plus handing out incentives would take time…

But I found out recently form a comment that going beyond the $1 was maybe not evident at first glance, so I am launching two new levels of contribution…

Roll the Credits Level

At $5 a month and up I will add you to a list of supporters for SPLOTs (see bottom of page) as well as the flickr cc attribution helper – but wait, there is more! While the attribution helper loads, it spins through a series of random messages.

Attribute enough and you will might see your name there.

Lots of people see this screen…

I just fiddled some with jQuery, and managed to insert a widget in the CC Attribution Helper Thanks page that runs through them all (randomly)

Media By Request

And for $15 a month and up, I will create upn request, one piece of original media per year-  a custom animated GIF or maybe yourself photoshopped into an album/book cover, or any other image you may want created.

Be like Bryan Alexander, is his bandwidth real or is it Memorex? This is one I did for fun as a tribute to how he felt on getting real broadband speeds after moving to the DC area from rural Vermont.

Other random stuff I can do…

Maybe that’s not an incentive.

All of these apply to people who have already sponsored me.

Should I go farther? At some level I’d be willing to make your organization a custom SPLOT, WordPress theme, or provide an online workshop.

Level Up!

And with friends like Howard, what more can I want?

https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/1194338482438602752

C’mon you know you want your name up somewhere in lights, right? Join the Roll the Credits Tier, and ZOOM! You are in.

Code Coda

I probably lace my project blog posts with a bit much code, and I totally forgot it here! This is not any effort to brag about my refactored OOP, but more in the every ongoing practice here of Explaining [or trying] How I Do Stuff.

As I was writing this last night, I was trying to envision a means to show the “funny” messages I use to display on the Flickr CC Attribution Helper (my first effort was running it like 10 times to get a screenshot). Why not use the functionality already built in?

The need for this, or desire came around when I was first developing the tool- after a remote call to the flickr API via jQuery, there was a delay in waiting for a response, leaving a blank screen. Yes, I could have put in some animated gif “Loading…” but that’s so… normal. So I had the idea of having it display some random expressions.

In the script that powers the attributor is a function for kicking off a process that will do this. It is set up with a SetInterval call, which makes something happen every 800 milliseconds.

// WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THE API 
// set up a time to change the status message
var waiting_msg = setInterval(function () { ChangeStatusMessage() }, 800);

The function I made is a bit brute force but works- load an array called funnyMessages and yank from it a random one and insert into a div named #attribution (where eventually the attribution content is displayed).

// Holders for message to let 'em know wheels are spinning
// Here is where you can have fun by adding new messages 
function ChangeStatusMessage() {
var funnymessages = ['Wishing to be as wise as Frances Bell', 
  'Being inspired by Mark Otter', 
  'Championing open education with Lorna Campbell',   
  'Favoriting all the tweets by Robin DeRosa', 
  'Taking cricket lessons from Rajiv Jhangiani', 
  'Buying at least 3 paintings by Sheila MacNeill', 
  'Getting Air (and GIFing it) with Terry Greene', 
  'Admiring the castle view of @ammienoot', 
  'Humbly thanking Robert Daniel', 
  'Gone curling with Clint Lalonde', 
  'Dreaming of walking the Flaggy Shore with Catherine Cronin', 
  'High fiving with Hugh Blackmer', 
  'Jamming in the studio with Irwin Devries', 
  'Getting inspired by economics listening to Jim Luke', 
  'Sending profuse thanks to Jim McGee', 
  'Checking our spelling of Autumm Caines', 
  'Peeking in  Barbara Ganley\'s garden', 
  'Greasing the tubes for transmission', 
  'Making a GIF with a hard G', 
  'Smiling at you for being a good attributor', 
  'Saying thanks to @SenorG for spreading the good word', 
  'Snickering at the people who keep saying flickr is dead',  
  'Feeding the squirrels who spin the turbines', 
  'Eating tacos with Ken Bauer', 
  'Bueller? Bueller?', 
  'Barking like a big dog', 
  'Has anyone seen my data? Jason?', 
  'Wondering about the meaning of life', 
  'Wishing Brian Lamb would blog more', 
  'Wondering if Jim Groom really exists', 
  'Knocking on the doors of the Emerald Castle saying please give us some API data', 
  'Crosswiring the figwitz circuit', 
  'Gazing up at the sky', 
  'Getting the lovely stuff', 
  'Sautéing onions and garlic in butter', 
  'Being cool in school like @bennettscience', 
  'Charging the flux capacitor',  
  'Engaging the Serendipity Happenstancer', 
  'Tossing frisbees', 
  'Making the donuts', 
  'Plugging in the Marshall amps and cranking the volume past 11', 
  'Pondering our measly existence', 
  'Asking Alexa for help',  
  'Double clutching and pushing the pedal to the floor', 
  'Whistling for Felix', 
  'Hoping for more nice sponsors on patreon' ];

// Attach the message to the screen. Aren't we clever?	
$('#attribution').text( funnymessages[Math.floor(Math.random()*funnymessages.length)] + '...');
}

The code then goes on to the API request, and when it is successful, the Funny Messages are stopped by:

// stop the random status messages!						clearInterval(waiting_msg);

I realized I could put the same code to use on a page where I’d like the messages to be displayed and never end. I had to first have it load jQuery and the cc-attributor.js scripts. The HTML for the page has a placeholder where the content will be updated later:

Loading...

This is done by an extra script at the bottom of the page:

// needed to keep the API timeout from triggering
 var attrib_str = 'something';
    	
$(document).ready(function(){
			
// Flip the message status
ChangeStatusMessage();
});

That’s using my own code for a different purpose, and it works like a champ.

---

Feature Image: “2010/365/218 You Have Reached Level 3” flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4867646001 shared into the public domain using (CC0)