you are kindly invited to sponsor my amazon addiction (or how I added a paypal “donate” button to my wordpress blog)

Time to read: 2 minutes

I have just started working as a freelancer, and intend to continue blogging and expanding my knowledge. Sadly, both of these pursuits, while extremely pleasant, are lucrative for amazon and bring me nothing more than joy. So I’ve decided, a bit belatedly, to add a paypal “donate” button to my blog for anyone who would like to sponsor my reading addiction.

My 3 most recent buys:

I care about design, photography, user experience, fashion, blogging, sewing, writing, and more. I’d be very happy to receive surprise gifts (possibly inspired by my amazon wishlist), but given I use that a bit as an “ooh shiny” collection rather than a carefully curated list of items I absolutely want to own, it might be more productive to simply donate something. That and you still can’t buy kindle books as gifts. And I read mostly on the Kindle these days. Trust me. It’ll go towards books. It always does.

To set up a PayPal button, predictably, you need a paypal account. I already have one, so I just went to this page and entered my details.

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 11.29.19

After choosing what the button looks like, you log into PayPal to register it. You even have choices about where to route people who choose not to donate after clicking on the button, or who did in fact complete their donation. It’s nice, because Paypal saves your button for you.

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 11.23.36

I then took that code and put it in a widget. Specifically, the “Text and html” widget (this is what worked in the end), which I made sit on my sidebar.

amazon

This is what it looks like on the exintaris.com blog.
Or would be, if it had worked. For some reason it simply won’t load up in the sidebar. Time to hack around and find out _why_. Hmm. Ok, I’ll use a different widget (so much for the html/javascript one…)
Aha, there we go then!

sponsorme

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