Monthly Archives: June 2009
Your thoughts: why so negative?
I came across this post on TechCrunch yesterday about SitePoints new project Flippa. I’m a fan of SitePoint, have been for many years, but I have not used any of their auction or design services. The thing that struck me the most about this situation is how negative the feedback and responses have been in regards to the new change to SitePoints website marketplace. I read it a couple of times and I kept coming back to a more general question: why is it that we typically respond to things we disagree with or don’t understand in anger? I’m just as guilty of this as the next guy… your number 23 on hold for phone support or your routine has been disrupted by product changes or something you have no control over and you fly off the handle at anyone or anything without thinking. Like SitePoint I recently made some modifications in one of my programs that users didn’t quite understand and instead of engaging me in open and civil dialog I received a number of very pissed and clearly unhappy e-mails. Why is it that when these sort of things happen we rush to anger instead of calmly and collectively reaching out to the person or companies involved to see if there is anything that can be done to correct what we see as a problem? Your thoughts?
Simplified Compatibility Checking
Fever, a new RSS feed reading application, just launched recently. Many of you might be familiar with the developer Shaun Inman from his popular stats tracking app Mint. I haven’t personally used Mint but I’m a huge fan of RSS feeds so when I heard about Fever I had to give it a shot. I will probably talk about the application a little later after I’ve had a chance to play with it. But, in this post I wanted to talk briefly about the unique checkout process Shaun uses to help make sure his users are installing the program on a compatable system before they even enter their credit card number.
Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 2) – Account Configuration
If you’ve ever accepted payments with PayPal you’ll know all the magic is in the settings/configuration. There are tons of configuration options that you can modify to make PayPal work just the way you like. The same holds true for Spreedly. The developers have paid attention to detail and provided us with the ability to tweak how the service interacts with your chosen payment gateway so you can get just the functionality you’re looking for. In the last post I gave you a brief introduction to Spreedly and walked you through creating your own free test account. Today we’re going to jump in head first and look at the account configuration options.
Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 1) – Overview & Account Setup
I developed Sign-Up-Sheet.com four years ago first as a sandbox project for learning Ruby on Rails (RoR). After becoming disillusioned with RoR, I redeveloped the app in PHP using CodeIgniter (CI) and that’s where it’s been ever since. Every once and a while I try to add a new feature here or there but find it very difficult to focus any time/energy on a product that doesn’t generate any revenue. The solution to this problem, of course, is to start charging for the service. But every time I researched what was involved with accepting credit cards the complicated pricing schemes and high costs always turned me away. That was until I found Spreedly! This post kicks off a new series that will take a detailed look at Spreedly. Over the next couple of weeks, I will introduce you to the service, walk you through how their system works and give you a real world example so you can see it in action.
Who is Chris Monnat?
Chris Monnat (aka mrtopher) is a web application developer and entrepreneur located in Alexandria, VA. This site is his island of information where he blogs about CodeIgniter, PHP programming, business topics, the Internet as a whole and other miscellaneous bits and bytes.
Learn more
| RSS Feed | |
| Subscribe by E-mail |