I’m happy to announce the release the most important update to Donation Can to date: Donation Can 1.4 is now live with the following changes:

• Currencies: Donation Can now supports all currencies supported by PayPal. All you need to do is to update the currency in plugin settings and all of your new goals will use that currency. You cannot change the currency of  existing goals (this would mess up the progress calculations) so any existing goals will still be in USD.
• Offline donations: You can now manually input donations received outside the plugin and they will show up in the donation goal’s progress bar.
• Improved PayPal donation notification (IPN) handling: With this complete rewrite of the payment notification handling code all the issues we’ve had where donations were not saved correctly should be history.
• Sandbox mode: Testing the plugin just got easier with the Sandbox mode option. Just tick one checkbox in the plugin settings and the donations use PayPal’s sandbox mode. Donations made in sandbox mode are not shown when sandbox mode is turned off.

Check out the plugin page to download the new version.

Update (just 15 minutes after the release… Ouch): There was a small bug in the 1.4 release that caused the donation progress bars to show up empty. I fixed it right away, so make sure to get version 1.4.1 instead of 1.4 and you’re all set to go!

I usually don’t like to cross-promote my blogs, but this time I posted something on Insanely Interested that I thought would be interesting to the audience of this blog as well.

Hop over to Insanely Interested to read the story of how someone “borrowed” my personal brand to land a freelance writing gig — as me!

This world has a power to make us humble.

Many things I consider important are not really worth spending precious efforts on. And many of the things that are worth it are not getting the attention.

Poverty, I believe, belongs to the second group.

Habitat for Humanity is doing important work bringing shelter to the beat up people of Haiti. Let’s help them out by collecting the money to build one house for one family.

Just a quick update to all Donation Can users out there: The first update to my Donation Can plugin is live!

Here’s a brief update on what’s new in this version:

1. You can now allow your visitors to specify the amount they want to donate. To do this, go to edit the donation goal and tick the check box that says “Include freeform donation option” in the “Donation Options” sections.
2. If you want to only have the freeform donation option, remove all donation options from the general settings and tick the checkbox mentioned above.
3. You can create goals without a target amount. For an example of this in action, check out the donation widget in this blog’s right side sidebar. To do this, just leave the “Fundraising Target” field empty and save changes.
4. You can embed donation forms to your blog posts and pages using a new quick tag. See this page for detailed instructions.

I have some bug fixes and new features (including support for recurring donations, different donation widget styles, and localization) still in the works and they will be released in a few weeks from now. And as always, I’d love to hear your comments and improvement ideas!

Go get the plugin here.

The author of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, has quickly become THE guy to go to when puzzled with questions about lifestyle design. He is never afraid to test and improve his methods, and his experiments show us that it’s possible to go well beyond the ordinary limits of our human minds and bodies.

Still, in many ways, most of us are very different from him and do not seek the same kind of lifestyle Tim is after.

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Today, I decided, it’s time to turn you all into runners.

So here we go: a collection of eight shots that I’ve taken on my runs around the neighborhood.

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Check out the plugin page for more information! I hope you enjoy Donation Can and find it useful in your online ventures.

Take a look at the right sidebar of this blog for how the plugin looks in action.

Good night!

At last, it’s getting time to announce the release of my first full featured free WordPress plugin: Donation Can will be released in one week from today, on Monday, August 24th, 2009.

In this post, I want to tell you a bit about the plugin and show one of the most interesting features, and hopefully get you at least a bit excited about what is coming up.

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It’s 2:30 and I can’t sleep. That’s why after an hour and half of trying to fake sleeping, I decided to just get up and write a blog post instead. All the things I wanted to say where already filling my head anyway.

This feeling is new to me. Usually, I’m the first one in any group of people to fall asleep. And until today, I’ve believed that even running wouldn’t change that fact. I was wrong — I just hadn’t experienced a tough enough exercise. Now, in the past two and a half hours since finishing my run, I’ve experienced everything from exhaustion to feeling shivery, to feeling so sweaty that I thought I was melting, and now, this feeling of extreme alertness that makes it impossible to fall asleep. Just like trying to sleep in the middle of the day.

So what happened?

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How you see the world defines what it is like for you.

On one of my longer runs (21 kilometers, I think) this summer, I was listening to podcasts by Steve Pavlina. I’m not sure how I ended up uploading them to my iPod, as I haven’t been an active reader of Steve’s blog for quite a while, and I think his stuff often goes to extremes that I find hard to agree with. But here I was, listening to Steve talk about fear. It was an interesting talk about how you can learn to control and overcome your fears, first by practicing, and then, ultimately, by changing how you see the world.

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