Category Archives: PHP

Introducing 33mail.com – Unlimited Disposable Email Addresses

I’ve just launched my latest project 33mail.com. Its a solution to the ever increasing problem of spam and the fact that you really can’t trust anyone with your email address anymore. The system is pretty simple, you sign up to 33mail with a username, say testing123, and you give 33mail your real email address, you can then create alias addresses using 33mail, such as blog.aclarke.eu@testing123dhy66s.kjjss33djjhsda2mail.com which will then be forwarded onto your real address. The kicker is that at any time you can kill the alias addresses you create, and because you can create unlimited addresses you can give a different one every time you need one.

The site is built with codeigniter and the email server backend is pure java.

I’d love to hear any feedback on the site design, functionality and the service as a whole.

Laser card custom payment module for Magento

While helping my brother out with bringing his sports shop online, I discovered Magento which is a pretty kick ass piece of php. One thing that Magento doesn’t have at the moment is a payment module for Irish Laser Debit cards, so I decided to write my own.

Some resources that I found useful were this and this, The first being from the Magento wiki and the second from a forum post.

The process is pretty straight forward once you get your head around all the config files, there are basically 10 files needed for the module (Coolbreeze is just the package name I gave the modules akin to the Mage group in magento) :

app/code/local/Coolbreese/LaserPayment/Block/Form.php
the controller for displaying the input form in the store and admin

app/code/local/Coolbreese/LaserPayment/Block/Info.php
the controller for displaying the card details in the store and admin

app/code/local/Coolbreese/LaserPayment/etc/config.xml
config stuff

app/code/local/Coolbreese/LaserPayment/etc/system.xml
more config stuff

app/code/local/Coolbreese/LaserPayment/Model/Laser.php
where the validation etc happens

app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/laserpayment/form.phtml
the form template for the admin interface

app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/laserpayment/info.phtml
the details display template for the admin interface

app/design/frontend/default/default/template/laserpayment/form.phtml
form display in the store

app/design/frontend/default/default/template/laserpayment/info.phtml
details display in the store

app/etc/modules/Coolbreeze_LaserPayment.xml
the main config file which tells magento that this module exist.

Here for your viewing pleasure is the module code to download.

To install it in a Magento installation just copy the app folder into the magento root and all the files will be put in the right place. Then go to admin -> System -> Configuration -> Payment Methods and enable the module.

Some cavaets :

I take no responsibility for breaking anything whatsoever so install this at your own risk or better yet look at the code and improve it.

The Laser number validation is pretty simple at the moment with no modulus checks. Something like this would probably be useful also as there is no client side validation just server side which works ok but is not ideal.

I’d love to hear feedback from anyone who uses this or finds it useful.