199
im not a skinny blogger, but im not so sure im a fatblogger either.
While my weight loss has been highly “unofficial”, I’ve lost 20 lbs since December 1st-ish.
I actually lost 15 of it during the month of december, but new years festivities put it right back on, and I’ve struggled to drop back down to that near-200lbs-point since. SXSW actually helped a lot, i dropped about 12lbs during those 5 days. I suppose no eating, lots of drinking, walking everywhere, and an hour of sleep a night will do that for you.
AAAnyway, my point was. I’m 199lbs as of 5 minutes ago. I havent been below 200 in a good year and a half or more. I was stable at 220, though everyone said I “wore it well”. But now that I’ve ducked back into the 100s, I’m pretty motivated to keep up the high stress/health-ish eating diet that’s succeeded for me this far.
[tags]weight loss, fatblogger[/tags]
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Independents Hall starts materializing
The last week has been a whirlwind of client work and all of the Independents Hall organization.
Monday’s meetup at Independents Brew Pub was a success, with about 20 people turning out and spending the evening talking about indie work in Philadelphia, and listening to some of our ideas for getting IH off the ground. Huge thanks to everyone that came out and participated. We’ll be having another one very soon. Johnny took some pictures for me, just to prove that the whole thing actually even happened.
Speaking of Johnny (John Bilotta Jr., for those of you who haven’t shaken his hand yet), he cranked out a bitchin’ design for the new IH homepage. And, after a day of banging on them…I rolled it out this morning. This is a live site in every aspect of being living. There are bugs. There is less than clean code. But, like the living-content that’s being contributed by the rest of the interent (knowingly or not), this will all smooth out in a little bit of time…I need to get back on some client work, I just wanted to get this thing UP THERE for you guys to look at! Bug-reports welcome, just don’t get pushy…cuz I’m working on it 
.
The concept for the home page was based on one I did for Inspiration Festival back in the fall with The Citizens, so it was a fitting concept for generating some buzz and excitement around Independents Hall.
As I mentioned before, I’ve looked at one space and have a couple more on my radar. There are some other exciting announcements regarding progress coming soon, but I don’t want to ruin all of the fun.
It’s pretty amazing to see all of this work starting to materialize and become a little more tangible. Lots more to report, I’m sure, but like I said I need to focus on some client work for the next couple of days.
As always, stay tuned.
[tags]independents hall, coworking, philadelphia, launch[/tags]
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Donation Buttons (and other easy tweaks) using Google Checkout's HTML API
A common request that I get with a lot of the non-profit or foundation work that I do is to have a donation button. Previously, PayPal was the way to go, since they had a donation button maker. The downside was, that paypal takes a cut on your donations unless you jump through some hoops to become a registered “foundation”.
Recently, Google Checkout has rolled out and has some rather enticing features…besides integrating their single sign-on checkout procedures, invoicing, and a bunch of other handy things…for the entire year of 2007 they are offering card-processing with no fees. Thats right…no fees. All of 2007. Nice.
Before I go on to listing my hacks, I do have one small request…I’m building up a referral base and if you have any intention of signing up for a new google sellers account, please consider using my referral link if the info below has helped you (or anything else ive ever posted has). it’s much appreciated, and I get a kickback on your sales (.5%). Full disclosure. Sign up here to use my code.
On to the help.
So…Google Checkout, like most of Google’s other services, has a pretty extensive API and code example library. Sometimes, though, you’re not looking for full integration. You just need a simple donation button where the user can specify any amount.
Or maybe a “buy now” button with a quantity…for tickets, for example.
At first glance…the Google Checkout buttons won’t let you. They only supply 2 options…buy now with a fixed price, or buy now with a drop down of pre-set prices.
So how did I build the buttons above? Using the HTML API. But before I could get started…even the demo code was screwing up with my Merchant Key…because I had missed one tiny setting.
This one’s important.
Under Settings->Integration, there is a checkbox that stops anything but digitally signed XML cart posts. While this IS an important security feature…since you arent posting any secure information via the HTML API, you’re safe enough to allow unsigned posts.
From there…just follow the example listed here on the API help guide. Using the first code block, replacing the dummy merch key with your own merch key should be enough to get it working. Assuming you can post the “chunky peanut butter” demo to your account, you’re ready to move on.
The next step is to make some modifications.
Here’s my ticket-purchase with quantity box code:
<form class="gcheckout" method="POST" action="https://checkout.google.com/cws/v2/Merchant/[[merchID]]/checkoutForm" accept-charset="utf-8">
<input type="hidden" name="item_name_1" value="Martini Tasting Cocktail Benefit"/>
<input type="hidden" name="item_description_1" value="Join Us for an evening of food & fun Martini tasting & silent auction at the Flanders Hotel."/>
<label>Quantity:</label><input type="text" name="item_quantity_1" value="1" id="qty"/>
<input type="hidden" name="item_price_1" value="3.99"/>
<input type="hidden" name="charset"/>
<input type="image" id="submit" name="Google Checkout" alt="Fast checkout through Google"
src="path/to/submit button" />
</form>
And here’s my donation button code:
<form class="gcheckout" method="POST" action="https://checkout.google.com/cws/v2/Merchant/[[merchID]]/checkoutForm" accept-charset="utf-8">
<input type="hidden" name="item_name_1" value="Quintin Foundation Donation"/>
<input type="hidden" name="item_description_1" value="Thanks for your donation. Every little bit helps!"/>
<input type="hidden" name="item_quantity_1" value="1" id="qty"/>
<label>Donation Amount: $</label><input type="text" name="item_price_1" value="" id="amt"/>
<input type="hidden" name="charset"/>
<input type="image" id="submit" name="Google Checkout" alt="Fast checkout through Google"
src="path/to/image/btn_donatenow.gif" />
</form>
At this point you should notice some differences between the demo code and mine. First, the form action is now posting to the actual cart form rather than the sandbox (i bypassed the whole sandbox thing since this isn’t a full e-commerce integration). Replace [[merchID]] with your own ID (and drop the angle brackets). I added the class gcheckout to the form tag for formatting purposes. Also, set the path of the input id=”submit” to your submit button graphic.
All of that leadup, and the trick itself is actually very simple!
The core pieces to making this whole thing work are the inputs, which, in the demo code, are all set to hidden. It’s very simple to change the type from hidden to text, and make them user-editable. By placing a label in front of them, and a little bit of styling, you get some pretty swanky buttons with user-input flexibility.
All of the customizable input fields are detailed here. This should allow you to specify shipping details, tax details, and many other parameters…depending on the needs. And remember…so long as you keep the “name” property, you can switch to a dropdown or a multi-select box…allowing you to create some fairly robust button codes!
Oh..and for debugging? Go back to that integration place (where you unchecked the shopping cart post security box) and check the log. It’s pretty useful when google checkout chucks a fairly nondescript error for the user, but lets you track down problems.
TAKE THAT PAYPAL!
I’ll come back to this post in about a week when we’ve launched the site that I figured this out for, so you can see the code in action.
Check things out at http://www.quintinfoundation.com. Note, that we were asked by Google to take down our donation button until there was some tax-related information squared up. More on that issue to come.
[tags]google checkout, donation button, HTML, API[/tags]
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"Weekends lose a bit of luster when you work at home."
Its true. You heard it here second, because it was said first (at least today) by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. John is a Philadelphia resident, and if my networking has served me as well as I think it has, he lives (or at least hangs out) fairly close to my ‘hood. He might even frequent the Starbucks that my girlfriend works at.
And yet, despite a couple of fairly innocuous attempts to contact on my part, he hasn’t returned my notes. C’mon John, it’s just a friendly outreach to find out who my neighbors are. I don’t want to be a creepy stalker-type, so its not like I’m gonna start tossing pebbles at windows and wait for you to answer the door. But you’re a public persona, like it or not. You make money from the fact that people like what you say, and how you say it. I’m just one of those people who happens to be your neighbor. WAVES HI
That’s the end of my “John Gruber won’t answer my emails” rant, and on to my real point: John is right. Working from home totally destroys nights and weekends. It’s hard enough, in this industry, to “turn off” at the end of the day. It’s downright impossible when your work is sitting across the room from you, staring you in the face, waiting for you. “I have an idea right now, no, this can’t wait until monday”, you rationalize with yourself. “I know I should be spending time with my wife/girlfriend/kids, but if I just get this idea out right now…”, you tell yourself. But it’s not healthy, at least not socially, to work from home all the time.
So where do people like us (I’m talking about me and John Gruber, a freelance developer and a freelance writer, but the message applies to anyone who’s a freelance creative of some sort) go? We work from Starbucks. Or some other local cafe. We spend $50/week on lattes, over-caffeinating for the sake of a comfy chair that ISN’T in our house. But we don’t get to really interact with the other patrons…why should they care about what I’m working on? And what should I have to do with their coffee break? Nothing. Coffee shop culture is great when it comes to the work-at-home crowd, but it only serves a single functional purpose: get out of the house (ok, two functional purposes, if you count that cup of coffee).
Enter coworking. Coffee shop culture, bohemian creativity, and migrant work-patterns…meet some of the structure and collaboration of an office-like setting. It’s beautiful, really. Not only are you paying for a space at a desk (rather than paying for overpriced coffee with the hopes of having one of the comfy chairs by the window), but you’re paying for exposure, you’re paying for opportunity, you’re paying for networking. You’re paying for utilities that you don’t have in your house (most likely)…I’m talking about conference space with projectors, white boards, and conference phones. You’re paying for some other cool “community” style resources that really benefit the indie community. Maybe group discounted health insurance. Maybe discounted car-share memberships. Maybe premium or early registration for local indie-run events. These are just a touch on the ideas for what kinds of services that could be offered to an organized, but still independent, group of creatives. And, you’re also put in touch with coworkers around the country…and around the world. It’s like being part of a company that has an office anywhere you travel to, but still having the flexibility of being a freelancer.
So, John Gruber…you’re right. Weekends lose a bit of luster when you work at home. So come work at Independents Hall. Get a chance to turn off at the end of the day. Start appreciating your nights and weekends more. Benefit from the resources that we can offer once we have a solid group of members. We’d love to have someone like John Gruber behind our initiative here. We’d love to have someone like John Gruber supporting the idea of organizing Philly independent talent.
I’d love to get an email from John Gruber saying, “thanks for helping me get my weekends back”.
But this isn’t about John Gruber, believe it or not. It’s about you. Are your weekends worth getting back? Drop in to our meetup on Monday at Independence Brew Pub and see what’s up. I’m pretty sure you’ll like what you see.
[tags]John Gruber, Independents Hall, Philadelphia, Philly, Coworking, coffee shop culture, weekends[/tags]
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first philly coworking meetup
quick announcement: If you’re interested in the future state of the independent community here in Philadelphia (and nearby communities), you should plan to attend our first meetup on Monday March 26th at 6pm at Independence Brew Pub. Details and directions on the Upcoming.org listing. Please RSVP.
Oh, we will also have some representatives from the Jersey Shore who are interested in starting “Coworking at The Shore”. Sweet!
This is all really exciting, I hope you can make it!
[tags]coworking, independence hall, meetup, philadelphia, jersey shore, independence brew pub[/tags]
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