xesite/blog/patron-page-2020-02-29.markdown

title	date
New Site Feature: Patron Thanks Page	2020-02-29

I've added a patron thanks page to my site. I've been getting a significant amount of money per month from my patrons and I feel this is a good way to acknowledge them and thank them for their patronage. I wanted to have it be as simple as possible, so I made it fetch a list of dollar amounts.

Here are some things I learned while writing this:

• If you are going to interact with the patreon API in go, use github.com/mxpv/patreon-go, not gopkg.in/mxpv/patreon-go.v1 or gopkg.in/mxpv/patreon-go.v2. The packages on gopkg.in are NOT compatible with Go modules in very bizarre ways.
• When using refresh tokens in OAuth2, do not set the expiry date to be negative like the patreon-go examples show. This will brick your token and make you have to reprovision it.
• Patreon clients can either be for API version 1 or API version 2. There is no way to have a Patreon token that works for both API versions.
• The patreon-go package only supports API version 1 and doesn't document this anywhere.
• Patreon's error messages are vague and not helpful when trying to figure out that you broke your token with a negative expiry date.
• I may need to set the Patreon information every month for the rest of the time I maintain this site code. This could get odd. I made a guide for myself in the docs folder of the site repo.
• The Patreon API doesn't let you submit new posts. I wanted to add Patreon to my syndication server, but apparently that's impossible. My RSS feed, Atom feed and JSON feed should let you keep up to date in the meantime.

Let me know how you like this. I went back and forth on displaying monetary amounts on that page, but ultimately decided not to show them there for confidentiality reasons. If this is a bad idea, please let me know and I can put the money amounts back.

I'm working on a more detailed post about pa'i that includes benchmarks for some artificial and realistic workloads. I'm also working on integrating it into the wamscloud prototype, but it's fairly slow going at the moment.

Be well.