CashHook

Increase your rate of donations by giving your community the recognition they deserve with a unique CashHook!

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💻 Domain Name

CashHook.tech (registered with domain.com)

💡 Inspiration

I was inspired to build CashHook (the name 'CashHook' coming from the idea of a web*hook* to track your cash) after using Ko-Fi for a while and seeing that my donators aren't able to get immediate recognition in the community for the contributions they make. I see it to be imperative that anyone who backs someone's projects or dreams gets recognition for doing so and for this reason I felt CashHook was necessary. In the past I had attempted to use Ko-Fi's webhook API but it seems their documentation is extremely empty making it difficult to use. I wanted to put a real world, usable fix in place to make webhooks easy for creators to track their income, for this reason I built CashHook for all 3 of the major donation and commissions platforms, Ko-Fi, Buy Me A Coffee, and Patreon, this means webhooks now take 5 minutes to create and have working rather than 5 hours or even 5 days!

👷‍♂️ What it does

CashHook is a webhook integration for Ko-Fi, Buy Me A Coffee, and Patreon that enables non tech people to create technical integrations for discord in just a couple of minutes! CashHook is built to run in autocode.com (which fully guides a user on how to set it up!) but can be manipulated to work in any hosting platform for users with dev knowledge. It creates a fully operable webhook (CashHook) that can then be connected to it's correct platform (Ko-Fi, Buy Me a Coffee, or Patreon) before interpreting the data received, parsing it to a legible JSON format and posting it in the human friendly output of a discord message embed.

TL;DR

  • Connects to Ko-Fi, Buy Me A Coffee, or Patreon via a webhook (CashHook).
  • Is easy to use whether familiar with tech or not!
  • Sends data in a human friendly format to Discord.

❓ How I built it

I built CashHook's webhook integrations using Autocode (running on AWS Lambda) to connect to a Discord integration and speed up the time of development with auto-installation of npm packages within the IDE as well as autocomplete using the lib API in order to send messages to Discord. For the website, I used a mixture of Bootstrap 4.6 with custom CSS in order to make a design I felt happy with. I also used PHP to populate the navbar and footer so that any future pages will all load the same details in the navbar and footer without having to update every page meaning that global assets can be controlled from just two documents rather than individually on each page. I then deployed the CashHook website to make it accessible on the web.

Technologies:

  • Javascript
  • node.js
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • PHP
  • Bootstrap 4.6
  • Autocode (AWS)

⚡ Challenges I ran into

When trying to work with all of the different webhook APIs throughout this project I found a lack of documentation throughout, leading for me to simply have to console log all of the accessible data to understand what was being received and how I could use that data effectively - this slowed things down as I had to plan the webhooks as I went based on what data I could retrieve from them!

When it came to building the website, I met a few problems in the Bootstrap Javascript library leading to me needing to use custom Javascript to power the navigation bar for mobile devices adding to development time.

Ending with deployment of the website, I ran into issues with my usual hosting network meaning that I then had to find an alternative, the domain cashhook.tech which I claimed through domain.com during this hackathon was locked in a bit of a DNS spiral and with the clocks ticking I had to think quickly, so I made demo.cashhook.tech to host the site for now while I get the hosting sorted as it's important to make sure everything is working as best as possible for now!

🌈 Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm extremely proud of how fast I was to solve problems, develop ideas and ultimately produce a fully working tool within one weekend. Producing CashHook brought me to new barriers but I was quick to overcome them and get things working which was great as I can sometimes spend weeks building a project like this.

👨‍🎓 What I learned

Throughout the whole of this hackathon I developed greater knowledge of Javascript, a language I had previously not been very comfortable with at all and used node.js to produce CashHook. I also learned to think critically and quickly to produce a product and solve unpredictable problems that cropped up along the way. Throughout deploying the website I also had the chance to touch up on my DNS management skills and learn more about how DNS works and the does and don'ts for fast deployments and faultless setups.

📅 What's next for CashHook

I hope to continue working on CashHook into the future and make it a leading product in the industry for anyone to use in order to increase their donation rates based off of the fact users feel recognised for their support. I believe the next step would be to build integrations for Square and Stripe so that direct donations also get their recognition. If possible I would also like to integrate with CashApp and PayPal to make CashHook the go to for anyone looking to get a public income feed within discord to show their funding and recognise their supporters to their projects.

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