When I bought my Dell Vostro 1000 for US$ 399 on Black Friday I was more then happy. I know that average laptops are not that expensive today but still it's hard to get such a good price, even after you spend a few hours looking for online offers on Black Friday.

But I wasn't as lucky with Amazon Vote 2007, I did not win the option to buy my favorite toy of the year, Sony's Playstation 3, or the HD Panasonic camcorder. Or maybe luck chooses different ways to come?

I got a message from a good friend yesterday, he had voted at Amazon after reading my article and won the option to buy a laptop, the HP Pavilion TX1305US, a 12.1" tablet PC actually. He wasn't interested on buying it and asked me if I wanted it. For US$ 299 it sounded like a good damn deal, regular price is between US$ 999 and US$ 1300.

So, I won my Amazon Vote option indirectly, thanks to a simple article I wrote here. Two laptops in a week for just US$ 698. Not bad, uh?

And what about the WAF? Screw the WAF! What do you think that your wife would tell if you've got two laptops, one for her and another for your daughter, for less than 700 bucks?

We are still a few hours from starting Black Friday, the name used in the United States for the day after Thanks Giving, but the offers have already started on many online stores.

Erik asked me what other sites, besides my all time preferred Amazon, are worth checking so I decided to make a short list, incomplete of course, of the sites I'm checking this weekend:

• Best Buy
• Newegg
• Circuit City
• COMPUSA
• Dell
• Apple Store

There are many notebooks below US$ 500 that make me doubt if I should get an Eee PC, a new System76 or a Macbook.

Yay!, it's hard to be a geek, specially when you don't get that PS3 offer on the first day of Amazon Vote.

Good luck shopping!

Would you like to choose your favorite products in Amazon and decide how much you wanna pay for them?

Why not? Amazon has just launched their Customers Vote campaign, this is the second year they do it, where you can choose your favorite products and prices in six categories and then, if you're one of the lucky winners, buy them.

There are great prices, like the Sony Playstation 3 for US$ 199 and the Panasonic HD camcorder for US$ 299 (that's like US$ 600 off the regular price).

Still here? Go vote at Amazon now and see if you can get your favorite gadget at a cool price (if your wife lets you, of course).

John Conde was the first one coding a PHP class for the recently launched Authorize.net Automated Recurring Payments API (ARB), he was also the guy who told me this so much wanted API was coming a few weeks ago.

His code was PHP 5 only so I made a few changes a have just finished my first version, which runs in both PHP 5 and PHP 4.

Download arb2.zip and let me know how it works for you.

I'm still testing and could find some small bugs which need to some polish, I'll update this post and code if needed.

You will need to have an ARB enabled Authorize.net account, of course.

You can test the class with the following sample code:

<?php
  require_once("AuthnetARB.class.php");

  $login = 'cnpdev4289';
  $transkey = 'SR2P8g4jdEn7vFLQ';
  $test = TRUE;

  $arb = new AuthnetARB($login, $transkey, $test);

  $arb->setParameter('interval_length', 1);
  $arb->setParameter('interval_unit', 'months');
  $arb->setParameter('startDate', date("Y-m-d"));
  $arb->setParameter('totalOccurrences', 12);
  $arb->setParameter('trialOccurrences', 0);
  $arb->setParameter('trialAmount', 0.00);

  $arb->setParameter('amount', 1.00);
  $arb->setParameter('refId', 15);
  $arb->setParameter('cardNumber', '5424000000000015');
  $arb->setParameter('expirationDate', '2009-05');

  $arb->setParameter('firstName', 'Joe');
  $arb->setParameter('lastName', 'Doe');
  $arb->setParameter('address', 'Casa 1872');
  $arb->setParameter('city', 'City');
  $arb->setParameter('state', 'FL');
  $arb->setParameter('zip', '33619');
  $arb->setParameter('country', 'us');

  $arb->setParameter('subscrName', 'The Test Account');
  $arb->createAccount();

  echo 'isSuccessful: ' .$arb->isSuccessful() . '<br />';

  if ($arb->isSuccessful()) {
    echo 'cool, it worked! <br />';
  } else {
    echo 'error in payment <br />';
  }

  echo 'isError: ' .$arb->isError() . '<br />';
  echo 'getSubscriberID: ' .$arb->getSubscriberID() . '<br />';
  echo 'getResponse: ' .$arb->getResponse() . '<br />';
  echo 'getResultCode:' .$arb->getResultCode() . '<br />';
  echo 'getString: ' .$arb->getString() . '<br />';
  echo 'getRawResponse: ' .$arb->getRawResponse() . '<br />';
?>

Enjoy.

For more than two years Drupal has been my content management system of choice for many projects, my own and my client's. Hence, when I decided to run a site for writing about teleworking and selling my ebook for teleworkers I chose Drupal and one of its most complete modules: ecommerce.

Just a few weeks after launching my new site I realized I needed a different approach for selling my ebooks and started writing my own module, I called it simply ebook.

This article is the first of a two-part series. You will know what my problem was, why I decided to write a new module for Drupal, what the ebook module can do for you, how to get it and install it (yes, it's GPL baby!) and my ideas for future versions. In the second part I'll share some insights from the programming process.

Download the ebook module.