Category : Nerding

This week I got finally got involved with maintaining the languishing TCPDF library on Github. Long overdue. Embarrassingly long overdue, since I’ve based one of my businesses on this open source gem for nearly ten years now. The author, Nicola Asuni, has been working for many years on a successor to TCPDF, but it is stalled… likely due to the usual reasons: life and cash. I can relate. I’ve been sitting on a huge WP plugin project for two years now, desperately trying to move it forward while life happens and I’m forced to prioritize support for my paying customers. A couple years ago an eager young programmer, William Desportes, hopped onto the TCPDF GitHub and made an incredible fork which would have really helped bring TCPDF into this decade. It needed massaging to work with PHP 8.0+ and he continue reading…

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) seems to be going the route of Freemius, etc., where you can use their open source plugin(s), but not without significant overhead. Except Freemius isn’t open source. 🤷‍♀️ With only a small share of the WP users needing file management plugins using their plugin and not a competitor’s, it’s a surprising move. Stripe Gets Pricey If you’re not paying for their annual license, or let your license term lapse, and wish to take payments with Stripe, you’re going to pay Stripe fees, plus a 3% “application fee” which EDD funnels off your sale using Stripe Connect. This fee used to be 2% until v.3.0. Now it’s 3% — that’s significant! With version 3.0 of EDD Stripe, EDD moved their entire Stripe integration over to Stripe Connect, which means all the sales on your private site go continue reading…

Over the years I’ve sure appreciated having Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) plugin to platform my plugin sales. It’s pretty cool, and handles most my needs including software licensing. However, I have had numerous little issues with the plugin. I apply each update with trepidation, because some changes (“upgrades”) have caused abrupt slumps in my sales. Of course the developers are well-meaning, and I’m sure these upgrades are in fact upgrades for certain people. But it’s becoming more and more clear that even though I’m a paying subscriber of EDD, their developers might not be “in touch” with the my reality or my customers’ realities. There are things a customer just. does. not. want. to. see. when. shopping. Case in Point With the latest updates to the Stripe payment gateway plugin, EDD moved to the new API and allows small text continue reading…

Years ago I set up an autoresponder to let people know I’m probably not around on Saturday and Sunday. It’s still running, and flawlessly, so I thought I’d share how I set it up using cPanel cron and FTP/File Manager. I got this idea originally from David Heath-Whyte’s blog, but adjusted it a little bit. It might help you to see two examples if you want to set this up yourself and aren’t quite sure how. Sometimes having the same thing explained twice by two different people helps! Note: this advice only works for people with self-hosted email. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! etc., look elsewhere. Also, you’ll need hosting with access to a cPanel. Step 1: Set up and compose your Autoresponder email Head over to your cPanel (“control panel”). Most hosting accounts will have a control panel of some sort, continue reading…

It’s amazing how some customers’ behavior can highlight innovative ways of saving money. It never occurred to me until I started selling software, and managing annual software licenses, that there’s a pretty simple way to save money when trying to renew software licenses, without a coupon. Many businesses pro-rate license upgrades, and prorate them by date, such that the closer you come to expiration, the cheaper an upgrade gets. So a frugal move to make is to wait until just days before your software license expires, then upgrade to the next level up… for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to renew the lesser license currently held. Voilà – we now have better access for another year, for cheaper than a straight renewal! While this is pretty cool for the customer, this is a big problem for software continue reading…

I wrote a little WordPress plugin that connects Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) to Wave Apps bookkeeping using the Wave GraphQL API. If you are accepting Stripe payments using EDD’s Stripe extension or PayPal Payments using EDD’s PayPal Commerce Pro, this EDD extension will automatically move bookkeeping data into your Wave Apps transactions using Wave’s GraphQL API. It saves a ton of data-entry, and picks up where a free Zapier account leaves off. In the plugin settings panel, you start by entering your Wave “full access token.” Get a token by creating an application in the Wave Apps developer portal. Once saved, this token allows the plugin to query its associated businesses. Choose your business (most cases there will only be one), and click save again. Now you can map your payment accounts and your download products to those matching in continue reading…

Things have gotten nuts for just about everyone lately, us included. Luckily the Little Package plugins are stable and they can sit tight for a bit. I can focus on customer support… and helping to run my partner’s business. He lost his longtime secretary to the task of Covid-19 era homeschooling, and I have stepped in to help while we see what this quarter brings. So, I’m very busy, very very busy. Luckily programming for the web lends itself well to streamlining a business, and we’ve been able to automate some bits. Last week I spent some hours over two days writing some code which replaces heaps of manual data entry for his business, practically replacing a full-time employee. At first I did this using Zapier. We found Zapier a couple months ago, and it’s pretty cool. I was playing continue reading…