Time is the fire in which we burn
I’ve got this website I’m working on and I’m trying to launch a new product. 1 The last time I launched something there I built a quick hacky WordPress plugin using PayPal to serve up the product once a person had made an electronic payment. Not only was it hacky, but looking back almost 2.5 years at that code I want to cringe.
Here’s part of the problem. I hate PayPal so much. They have ugly payment buttons, all the buttons are branded PayPal – which is a mixed blessing2 , unless you have a merchant account your users have to go through PayPal’s payment screens on their site – which causes users no end of angst, the user has to sign up for a PayPal account – which is a whole new layer of tech support nightmares when dealing with the technologically challenged, and I could go on.
I figured I’d give Stripe a shot, it’s supposed to be developer friendly. After wrestling with it for two hours I’m giving up. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that I’m tired and I’m just not getting it and it’s easier to think like myself-as-a-crappier-coder-two-and-a-half-years-ago and fix up what I’d written than it would be to learn Stripe and shoehorn new code into my old code.
Some days I just want to tear down that website and start from scratch. I just don’t have the time.
On a completely unrelated note, I’m loving this new CompFight WordPress plugin. I’m extra happy about it since I contributed a quick one-line fix that helped improve the plugin. This one little plugin is going to basically make it about 100 times more likely I’m going to be able to drop a fun image into my posts. CompFight is a website that streamlines searching for Flickr CC licensed images. I was actually toying with the idea of making such a plugin when I found out they just developed their own. Awesome.
- Photo Credit: Riccardo Cuppini via Compfight [↩]
- Good: People know and trust PayPal. Bad: It’s freaking PayPal and kinda looks hokey. [↩]