Don’t ask for my credit card number for a free trial

Posted by James Beattie - under News 4 Comments

Offering a free, limited time trial for a software product or online service is not a new trend, however a recent development is vendors requesting credit card details before access to the trial is possible.

I recently decided to check out Audible, a service that supplies audio books for portable audio devices. They are a regular advertiser on my favourite podcast, Security Now,  so after hearing a recent offer on this podcast for a free Audio Book, I decided to give it a go.

The initial free trial page is friendly and attractive, and simply asks for your name, email address and country:

This is all fair enough, so I entered my details and then I was presented with this page:

As you will notice, there is a payment section here requiring my credit card number to continue with the free trial. You may also notice the small link just above the credit card payment form titled “Why do you need my credit card information for a free trial?”. Clicking on this link presents the following pitch:

Our free trial offer is valid to customers new to Audible. Entering your credit card ensures that your AudibleListener® membership service will continue uninterrupted. In addition, it helps prevent abuse of our special offers. Cancel your trial within the trial period and your card will not be charged.

I have a problem with providing my credit card details for the following reasons:

Internet Security

I never give out my credit card online without a very good reason. In this age of internet fraud and identity theft any provision of my credit card to an online provider is made with due dilligence. A provider has to earn my trust first.

I am not willing to provide my credit card to get access to a trial version of a service that I may or may not choose to continue after the trial.

If a vendor has confidence in their offerings, they should not need this reassurance upfront. I also don’t like vendors storing my credit card details at all I would prefer to manually enter them at the time of payment and not have any online systems keeping a record of them in some possibly vulnerable database.

I am forgetful

I may sign up for trial version now and then forget to cancel it, even though I have no intention of using the service. With some vendors, if you do not cancel it before the trial verison is over, you suddenly start getting charged for the service you are not using. I think this is the real reason these vendors want your credit card upfront - because it gives them the ability to start billing you the moment they can. (I don’t know whether Audible is one of these services, as I did not proceed with the trial verison specifically because of this matter).

I think this a fundamentally unethical approach to earning revenue and I would encourage vendors not to ask me for my credit card number at the start of a “free” trial. I would even go further and encourage vendors not to store customer credit card data at all - there are other approaches that do not risk your customers credit card data.

Use a web-designer, not a print-designer to design your website

Posted by James Beattie - under News 2 Comments

Many traditional advertising agencies are, by neccessity, now moving into the web design and web development space. This makes perfect business sense considering the large amount of money which is being refunneled from traditional advertising methods into online advertising and marketing.

An unfortunate side-effect of this is that graphic designers with a background in print are now passing themselves off as web-designers without doing the requisite study/training/self-education to move to the new medium. The problem with many print designers is they do not understand the intricacies of working within web browsers. They are used to their design being exactly represented when it comes out of the printing press.

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Tags: Design

Symfony Tip: Admin Generator + sfGuardPlugin + SfGuard Profile

Posted by James Beattie - under News 1 Comment

If you get the error “Call to undefined method BasesfGuardUser::addsfGuardUserProfile” when using a custom sfGuardUser profile, you need to add the following method to the file /plugins/sfGuardPlugin/lib/model/sfGuardUser.php

  public function addsfGuardUserProfile()
  {
    if(!$profile = $this->getProfile())
    {
      $profile = new sfGuardUserProfile;
      $profile->setUserId($this->getId());
    }
    return $profile;
  }

I know it sucks to hack a core plugin file, but sometimes we must pragmatic!

Tags: php, symfony

Symfony Tip: Propel pager with group-by returns incorrect total

Posted by James Beattie - under Developer 2 Comments

A quick tip for those getting incorrect record totals (and thus broken paging) when using the propel pager in Symfony:

Add the following method to your pager object:

$pager->setPeerCountMethod('getGroupedCount');

Then create the following method in your peer class:

    public static function getGroupedCount($c)
    {
        $copy = clone $c;
        // this should be the intended grouping column
        $copy->addGroupByColumn(parent::ID);
        return parent::doCount($copy);
    }

Your pager will now work the way you want it to!

Tags: php, symfony

Managing your personal online reputation

Posted by James Beattie - under Writing 1 Comment

We recently recommended to a client that they set up a page on their website promoting themselves (and optimised for their name) so that people searching for them in Google would get this page as (hopefully) the first result.

The client expressed some concerns about putting themselves out on the web as a personal brand, and we thought some of the issues that were brought up were worth a mention here.

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Tags: brand management, online marketing, reputation management, search engines, tips

sfJqueryFormValidationPlugin - A client-side form validation plugin for Symfony

Posted by James Beattie - under Developer 5 Comments

Jimmyweb is proud to present our first plugin for the Symfony Framework!

The plugin is called sfJqueryFormValidationPlugin (yes it’s a mouthful) and a beta version is available now from the plug-ins section of the Symfony website.

This plugin adds much-needed client-side form validation to sites built with the new(ish) Symfony forms framework. Presently, you can only specify server-side validation rules in a Symfony application - so our plugin parses the server-side rules into a format which can be understood by the jQuery Validation plugin, which in turn utilises the exceptional jQuery javascript library.

This essentially means that you get client-side form validation in your Symfony applications with no additional work whatsoever.

In a recent project, I had to build client side validation manually for a Symfony project with a number of  large forms. The validation alone took two days to build and test. This plugin would have reduced two days of development from this project, had it existed then (in fact this was the catalyst for the production of the plugin in the first place).

This plugin is still in Beta, however we are running it successfully on a couple of production websites so far. We would encourage Symfony developers to give it a try and come back to us with bugs, suggestions, enhancements or comments.

In the future we are looking to add extra features such as accessibility enhancements and features to make forms more attractive.

Tags: development, javascript, jQuery, plugin, symfony

Using virtual machines

Posted by James Beattie - under Developer 1 Comment

For the uninitiated, Virtual Machines (VM’s) are a software and/or hardware solution which simulate a completely separate computer environment on an existing computer.

This ‘Virtualized’ environment acts as if it were a second computer sitting next to your current computer .

This technology allows you to,  for example,  run a different operating system from within your current one.  (E.g You can run Windows XP in a Virtual Machine from within Windows Vista).

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Tags: virtual machine, vm

Cloud computing in the modern office

Posted by James Beattie - under Jimmyweb 1 Comment

Someone recently said that cloud computing is like teenage sex - talked about more than actually done. And usually done badly.

Having recently set up our office in Sydney, we decided to do more than just talk about it (cloud computing that is). As a startup company, we need technology which is cost effective and requires very little ongoing maintenance.

In this vein, we implemented the following technologies for our office:

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Tags: cloud computing, gmail, skype, subversion, tips