This post is about my new experiment: http://rooster.am
I’ve heard a lot of Hype about Stripe. I have monetized two websites in the past with the infamous Paypal buttons.
Both of those sites have shut down since, but I did learn a lot about installing Paypal buttons. It’s probably the most terrible part of any website I’ve ever built.
In one case, I resold ventrilo servers. The worst part of this was rigging a Paypal button to a server cpanel. I might have been 15 or 16 when I resold them. It’s a terrible idea.
Anyway, today I decided to install Stripe after work on a two year old hack called rooster.am. It’s a two year old winning HackNY hack that uses Twilo and various APIs to give you an awesome wake up call: http://rooster.am/
I have been paying for rooster.am for nearly 2 years, making no money just because I thought it was fun. It turns out that’s not really a good investment.
So today I spent the afternoon installing Stripe. I’ve been learning a lot about Google Analytics while working at the Hype Machine and was inspired by Bingo Card Creator guy.
It was really simple. I was able to use their Javacript API and PHP library and paste something together in an afternoon.
Whats impressive about this is that I haven’t really modified this code since NYTM in 2011. I’m at least a version outdated of everything, including CodeIgniter and jQuery and Google Analytics.
I used their extremely simple libraries, stripe.js and php-stripe (in CodeIgniter mode). I only had to add one field to my database.
Everything worked as promised. Stripe has a cool “test mode” where you can try out your payments with fake credit card numbers that always return some kind of error on your app.
I did this on a server that has no staging environment, no build or deploy scripts, no nodejs backends, no tests or mongodbs.
Strip makes it super easy to do one of the most daunting tasks in web development. Making integration simple is really important and a genius business model.
Next I need to do some front end updating. Site isn’t even responsive :/
