Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I run Dave's Web Of Lies (pluggity plug), an internet database of lies that I like to think of as the only place on the internet where you really know the truth of what you're seeing. One of the features that I've been working on in the background is the Lie Of The Day By Email system, where you can subscribe to get a steaming fresh lie delivered to your email address every day. The site as I inherited it from Dave Hancock will always be free, but for other things I feel allowed to make a bit of money to pay for hosting, etc.

At the moment the site is more or less working. You can subscribe anew, or existing subscribers can log in, and see their details and change things as necessary. Email addresses will be confirmed before actually allowing a change. The only thing that doesn't exist yet is the ability to take money for the subscription. Enter the stumbling block.

Up until now I've been intending to use PayPal to collect money, but the key thing holding me back is the paucity of actual working code to do the whole online verification of payment thing. Maybe I'm more than usually thick, but I find the offerings on PayPal's website and on CPAN to be hard to understand - they seem to dive too quickly into the technical details and leave out how to actually integrate the modules into your workflow. I'd be more than glad to hear from anyone with experience programming websites in Perl using PayPal, especially PayPal IPN. I obviously need time to persevere.

Now Google is offering their Checkout facility, and I'm wondering what their API is going to look like. Is it going to make it any easier to integrate into my website than PayPal? Is the convenience of single-sign-on billing going to be useful to me? Should I wait and see?