Pete Keen

A few weeks ago I introduced Payola, a drop-in Rails engine for setting up Stripe billing.

I released an open source Rails engine named Payola that you can drop into any application to have robust, reliable self-hosted Stripe payments up and running with just a little bit of fuss.

Almost all of my applications, both public and personal, run on a collection of virtual private servers (VPSs) hosted in various places including DigitalOcean and my own data center (i.e. the Mac mini in my basement).

Over the last few weeks I've been playing an idle game called AdVenture Capitalist.

At the ripe old age of 12 I started messing around with computers.

If you do anything more advanced with email than hitting "Send" in Gmail then you should care about deliverability, which is the likelihood that your email will end up in your intended recipient's inbox instead of their spam folder.

A few weeks ago Stripe's SSL certificate became invalid, along with several other major sites.

When I started Okapi LLC, my little consultancy and publishing house, I had to fax in some forms to the State of Michigan.

Sometimes you have a VirtualBox VM that's critical to your workflow.

Say you want to give a customer an account credit for some reason.

Stripe provides a gorgeous pre-built credit card form called Stripe Checkout.

I've had a GitHub account since 2008.

One of the very first things I did when I started working on the idea that eventually became Mastering Modern Payments was set up a Mailchimp mailing list.

One of the most common issues that shows up in the #stripe IRC channel is people setting up their front-end Stripe Checkout integration and then expecting a charge to show up, which isn't really how Stripe works.

Yesterday a friend of mine linked me to a fictional web serial that he was reading and enjoying, but could be enjoying more if it was available as a Kindle book.

A few days ago I built a new tool I'm calling Sites.

Trading markets of all kinds are in the news pretty much continuously.

My wife and I recently moved from Portland, OR to Ann Arbor, MI.

A little over a year ago I announced the launch of my latest (at the time) product named Marginalia.

When you're writing a Rails application you usually end up with a lot of CRUD-only controllers and views just for managing models as an admin.

Over the past few years I've written a number of Rails applications.

Three months ago I decided to write my first technical book and it's earned me over $5,000 in the two weeks since launch day, so I thought I decided to share what I've learned.

I'm so proud to announce that Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails is officially launching this morning.

Frequently I come across confusion with domain names.

Over the past few years I've put together a number of projects that use Stripe and their Ruby API to collect payments and manage subscriptions.

Let's say that instead of running a Software as a Service, you're actually building and shipping physical products.

I've been writing my guide to integrating Stripe with Rails using markdown, as with most textual projects that I work on.

For various projects including Mastering Modern Payments I've found it really useful to be able to view the Markdown source rendered as HTML but I don't really care about editing it online.

As a kid something about the Millennium Falcon always bothered me.

A few months ago I posted about how I run my own DNS servers using my virtual private servers and tinydns.

"Thank you for calling the Bergs and the Keens.

After a lot of thought and deliberation I've decided to retire bugsplat.info as my blog address.

Processing payments correctly is hard.

Andrew Blum took his Internet service completely for granted until one day a squirrel chewed through a cable in his neighborhood, cutting off his access and sending him around the world, attempting to answer the question: What exactly is the Internet?

For the past three years this blog has has featured the same basic design.

Update: The Magic Trackpad 2 fits in the same spot but you might have to use a different sticky material.

For as long as I can remember I've been trying to find a good way to keep personal text notes.

Inspired by Tim Bray's recent post about encrypting his website, I decided to enable and force HTTPS for bugsplat.info.

Yesterday I suddenly developed the intense need to add search to this site.

For the longest time I used zoneedit as my DNS provider of choice.

Last month I wrote a short article describing a method of deploying a 12-factor application application to your own hardware or VPS, outside of Heroku.

A few months ago I created a hosted document conversion service named Docverter.

Deploying Heroku-style 12 factor applications outside of Heroku has been an issue for lots of people.

Heroku is a Platform as a Service running on top of Amazon Web Services where you can run web applications written using various frameworks and languages.

Earlier this year I bought a new Mac mini for various reasons.

Today I added PDF, Docx, and Markdown download links to the bottom of every post here on Bugsplat.

In addition to writing on this blog, I've been keeping notes for various things on Marginalia, my web-based note taking and journaling app.

I'd like to present my new webapp, Marginalia, a web based journaling and note taking tool.

Recently I sat down and reorganized my dotfiles around the tasks that I do day-to-day.

When I released Dokuen last week I had no idea it would get as much press as it did.