Category: Personal

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So I’ve decided to drop Blogjune

Despite my early enthusiasm for Blogjune, saying I’d join various others in writing a blog post ever day this month, I’ve decided to give it a miss.

While I do want to be writing more of the essays I used to write, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with — including The 9pm Edict podcast, figuring out what to do with Corrupted Nerds, and of course generating more paying work.

Once I’d fallen a couple of days behind, the “commitment” to this arbitrary project was really only causing stress, without generating much in the way of benefits. So I’m quite happy to have dropped it.

The five Blogjune posts I did write are all tagged blogjune.

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Blogjune, yes, but why? [blogjune01]

Buddha Brian on a log: click to embiggenI’ve never been much of a joiner. I don’t play nice with other children. Well, more them with me, the vicious little bastards. But I’ve joined Constance Wiebrands’s Blogjune project this year anyway. I suspect it was a stupid decision.

“What the fuck did you sign up to that for,” screams my alleged professional side.

“You’ve got leads for paying work you could follow up. But no, you’re pissing away time on things like 5at5. You did an episode of Corrupted Nerds this week, which doesn’t have any income yet, when you’d already been paid to do another episode of The 9pm Edict in May and you only just managed to sneak that in before midnight last night. What’s wrong with you?”

Continue reading “Blogjune, yes, but why? [blogjune01]”

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“Tip Stilgherrian” page operational, with few glitches

Stripe logoNow that I’ve run two successful crowdfunding campaigns through Pozible, I’m starting to set up systems to accept direct payments for my various projects. The first, a page to accept one-off donations was mostly straightforward.

I chose to use Stripe as the card payment service because I already had a Stripe account for my second Pozible project, The 9pm Resurrection.

While Stripe is still in beta in Australia, Pozible already uses it to handle recurring subscription payments, and I’d already received an invitation into the beta program. I figured it made sense to keep all my payments in one place.

Plus I’ll eventually be using Memberful to process subscriptions, and that also uses Stripe.

To integrate Stripe into this WordPress site, I used the free plugin WP Stripe from Human Made Limited. This provided me with one payment form per website, which is all I needed for this task. I also installed the WP Stripe Email Receipts plugin by Philip Newcomer.

All that went smoothly. I installed the plugins, activated them, entered my Stripe account keys and a template for the email receipts — and they just worked.

The only difficulties came with configuring Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on the web server, and that was down to a bug I encountered in the WHM/cPanel hosting management software while I was installing the SSL certificate. That’s nothing to do with Stripe or WordPress or the plugins, of course, just my dodgy web server.

I’ll document that bug over the fold. Meanwhile, why not try out the system and give me a tip? Was that too blatant?

Continue reading ““Tip Stilgherrian” page operational, with few glitches”

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“Corrupted Nerds” on privacy engineering

Cover image for Corrupted Nerds: Conversations episode 10: click for podcast pageAfter a gap of some six months, I’ve finally produced another episode of the Corrupted Nerds podcast.

Earlier this month, during Australia’s Privacy Awareness Week, I had the very great pleasure of meeting McAfee’s chief privacy officer, Michelle Dennedy.

Not only did I end up writing a ZDNet Australia column a few days ago, Developers, ask your users about data privacy, I so thoroughly enjoyed the conversation that it inspired me to bring Corrupted Nerds back from recess.

In brief, privacy engineering is the process of turning various policies, from privacy laws to the needs of the business’ plan for data, into something that programmers can work with — indeed, something they’ll want to work with because it’s now an engineering problem.

I think you’ll agree that this conversation with Michelle Dennedy is rather fun.

Corrupted Nerds is available via iTunes and SoundCloud.

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Announcing “The 9pm Excuses”

So you know how the other day I told you about the return of The 9pm Edict podcast and how the next episode would be posted on Sunday 4 May? Well it isn’t going to happen quite like that.

I did go to Sydney’s Sutherland Shire as planned yesterday. And I did record stuff. But for reasons explained in this mini-podcast, I didn’t get the material I needed to fulfil the plan. Sorry.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:35 — 2.4MB)

I’m heading back to Cronulla tomorrow. Stay tuned. I’m hoping to post the new episode on Tuesday 6 May or thereabouts.

Meanwhile you can listen to all of the episodes, now and in the future, if you subscribe to the podcast feed, or subscribe automatically in iTunes, or go to SoundCloud.

If you’d like to comment on this (non-)episode — or suggest people, places or things that I should check out — please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

You can also check out the progress videos I made on the YouTube playlist.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission. The sound of the waves breaking on the beach was recorded at Cronulla yesterday and it’s mine, I tell you, all mine.]