13 Aug 2019, 16:47 281

I'm testing a feature on the website. I sat down and wrote a bit of code, and from now on I can publish new pages and they will be available to patrons only, and patrons can log in and view them on the website.

Basically what I've been doing on Patreon before, except better: I've removed a lot of unnecessary steps for myself, and made it more obvious for those who would want to read new stuff. I don't have to publish pages twice, they're finished, and I need to press only one button to convert them to public whenever I want.

The code is still a bit shaky on my side and I can think of two or three ways to improve this, so I will keep testing to make sure that they work better, but for now it is good enough and I'm going to roll out the updates on the website. Honestly, I'm way too happy that I managed to pull this off. There was a point in time when I was thinking about moving the entire website to Wordpress because it has Patreon plugin. But hey, I have brains! I wrote my own thing for GetSimple!

Anyway, I would much appreciate new patronage and help with testing this thing.

Okay, okay, but.. How does it work?

Simple!

1. Open dreamdb.com and witness something like:
   
2. Become very excited and click the link.
3. If you're logged out on Patreon, it asks you to register an account or log in, and then one of three things will happen:

• If you're currently my patron, you give permission to my app to store some data and give you a cookie, and then you can read the page.
• If you're not a patron, you get redirected to a page where you can become one, and then proceed as above.
• You don't login, don't pledge, don't get access, get lost somewhere in the links and nothing happens. That's a possibility.

Followers don't get access. People who don't pledge to a tier don't get access (custom pledge to a tier is ok, but custom pledge without isn't).

If the process was a success, you'll see thumbnails, "unlocked" icon and won't get redirected anymore:

I will also make sure to notify everyone when new pages become available for Patrons and when they go live for everyone.

Why do this at all?

Sometimes I post a thing, and then go back and change it. Sometimes, I make mistakes, copy-paste the wrong stuff or forget to erase something. It's a messy process and I would love for people to lend me a pair of eyes and say if anything is wrong anywhere. I've also been sharing pages on Patreon before and it felt like I needed to do 3000 extra things to publish everything after that. Also Patreon's post editor still FUCKING SUCKS. So this feels more natural and I have more control over presentation. If you help me, we could make this thing become better (and I could pay website bills and maybe eat). If you don't want to or can't support me, then nothing changes for you: pages will go live whenever I decide to make them public and you still will read all the stuff. But I will still share secret art on Patreon, and there still will be free posts about how I make things, so maybe consider at least giving me a follow (for free! did I mention following is free? FREE).

This post on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/29126703/