Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS
Justin and Jason discuss implementing a subscription payment system
using PayPal’s API, how to learn from your customers, the inherent
disadvantages of following a waterfall development methodology, how to
remain productive when procrastinating, how most of the great
companies started out doing something different from what ended up
making them successful, the difficulty of debugging multi-threaded
C++, allowing market leaders to do your market research for you and
building an ORM (object relational mapper) from scratch.
Just a quick note to say that I have finished the subscription stuff and it now works very nicely. My solution was to insert each subscription payment into a table that has a field called expiry_date (a timestamp).
Then when checking to see if the user has a valid subscription I simply “select * from my_table where user_id = 1 AND expiry_date > “.time() — with time() being the regular php function. This way I can pull back all the valid subscriptions that a user has and see which has the highest/lowest amount of access to the product.
It’s useful to do it this way because it enables users to upgrade/downgrade and I can get their subscription levels with just one query – yet they can be running multiple subscriptions at any given time.
Hope this makes sense!!
As far as I know, the FreelanceSwitch job board (http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/) has been charging the developers, rather than then posters, since the site started. The developers pay around $7 a month to get the contact information of the companies who post jobs on the site.