Owner of Awio Web Services LLC,
graduate student at Drexel U.,
community advisor at SitePoint.
LATEST PROJECT: WP Review Site 2.0
ARCHIVE October, 2008
Unintended side-effect of PayPal
The biggest problem that’s surfaced with shifting the majority of orders to PayPal for payment is in tracking advertising. There’s been a significant drop-off of hits to the thank-you page after making payment — customers are leaving after PayPal’s receipt page without clicking the “return to site” button. Since the thank-you page is where [...]
Working at a global corporation
It’s interesting working at a global corporation for a while. Half my product team is in the US, half is in India, and more are being hired in China. It’s something else to be in a live meeting, looking at and discussing the exact same lines of code on our screens, while hearing the [...]
Multiple local websites with Apache in Windows
Recently I’ve been working on 3 or 4 projects at the same time on my desktop. While my primary IDE has changed to Visual Studio (even for PHP with VS.PHP), the rest of my development environment is mostly the same as it’s been since December. My projects are growing in code size, and the [...]
An update on fraud with PayPal
So far, so good. It will take at least 2-3 months to find out whether anything’s actually changed after switching to PayPal as the sole payment provider for new customers; stolen credit cards used without a PayPal account won’t show up on the rightful owner’s billing statement any faster. But I can say that [...]
Betting on IGOR
This book was my best buy of the year so far. It packs tons and tons of experience into 400-some dense pages of interviews with the founders of 30 startups. I was particularly interested in the story of PayPal’s early days as recounted by cofounder Max Levchin, the guy that drove technology for [...]
Will 53% of customers switch to PayPal?
It’s time to find out. I just rolled out the updated Visitor Boost and Targeted Visitors sites that send all new customers directly to PayPal for payment. This is the riskiest thing I’ve ever done with these sites, but I need to start taking some risks — I’ve got 10 months until I graduate [...]
Monetization Plan for W3Counter
Continuing my trend of not taking any of the advice given, coming up with a new option instead, I don’t plan to pick any of the choices I laid out for monetizing W3Counter. Missing from that list is what I am going to do instead — add more value to the paid accounts so [...]
Missing Money and Solving Chargebacks
In the past few weeks, I’ve mentioned some “missing money” a few times – QuickBooks telling me I earned more this year than I could account for in my bank accounts. I think I finally found that today while going over things again and figuring out how July went (worse than May and June, [...]
Amazon.com’s ESP
I’m pretty sure Amazon has hired some psychics and hooked them up to the internet. Today I followed a link to Beautiful Code, the website of a newly published book about how great modern programmers think. I decided it looked interesting, and clicked the link to O’Reilly’s store, where the book is $44.95. Wondering [...]
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