On Wednesday, I sent out three emails about “The Yii Book”, the contents of which I’ll summarize here. But first, if you’re not receiving these emails but you’d like to, you can set that on your Yii account page.

As for those emails, and this summarization, the tl;dr version is:

* A rough draft of Chapter 19, “Extending Yii,” is available for download on the account page.
* Got some plans on doing more work on this going forward.
* You all are great!

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Server Migration Complete?

January 13, 2014

So…it was an unnecessarily rough migration, and a very frustrating Sunday, but I think the server migration is complete. I had to reimport 10 orders for “The Yii Book” (that happened on the old server). If anyone has any problems with “The Yii Book” site or their account, please let me know. I’ll open the forums back up momentarily. If anyone catches anything else odd or untoward or…, please let me know. Thanks to everyone for their patience and understanding!

Server Maintenance

January 10, 2014

Starting tonight, Friday, January 10th, 2014, I’m going to pause some activity on my site for necessary maintenance. My hosting company, ServInt, will be migrating my VPS to a new server (big yay!). The migration will give me a much more current machine, with much more current software, including the latest version of PHP (big yay!). But during the migration, no new data can be added to the sites, whether that’s comments in the blog or postings in the forum. So I’m pausing both for the time being. Once I’ve confirmed the sanctity of my sites (over the weekend), I’ll renable the disabled features. Hopefully this will be Sunday, or Monday at the latest.

Please do not send me any emails (in lieu of a comment or forum posting)! Any emails I receive will go to the back of the queue, and I’m currently trying to get through December’s emails. You’re best off waiting until Monday and posting a comment or forum message then. Really. Also, you should take a couple of days off anyway. It’ll be fine.

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience. But this migration has been a long time coming and is sorely needed. And if you wait until the perfect time, well, that never comes.

I wanted to wait on saying something until the chapter was on its way to the tech editors, but it’s the end of the year and the chapter is close enough to being done that I can offer an update now. My wife and kids went away to visit friends for a couple of days, and I stayed home to work, spending the vast majority of my time on “The Yii Book”. Not only did I make pretty good progress on Chapter 19, but I got my Yii book mojo back (in terms of being in the flow and mindset), which is just as important.

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On January 30th, 2014, I’ll be presenting “Using, and Learning From, Stripe“, at the online eCommerce Web Summit. This is one of several conferences put together by the awesome folks behind php[architect]. Mine is one of four presentations that are part of this online e-commerce conference:

Tickets start at $39 for the recording only, and $49 for the live (online) attendance. And you will be able to ask questions during the live presentation!

There are two thrusts to my specific presentation. About two-thirds of the content will explain how to use Stripe to accept payments online. I’ll cover both one-time charges and recurring billing. Along the way, I’ll emphasize best practices and any applicable tips and tricks.

In the last third of the presentation, I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned in my few months at Stripe. I’ve organized the ideas into three categories: technical, structural, and personal. The technical and structural lessons are intended to help you design your product and run your business. The personal lessons are my way of sharing what it’s been like to work for an organization of Stripe’s calibre, with such amazing coworkers.

I think it’ll be a great afternoon of online e-commerce talks, and I hope you’ll consider joining in. Let me know if you have any specific questions or thoughts about it.