Hey! Flying Monkeys!

[lwood]

Dear Lazy Geekweb:

One of my hosting clients would like to be able to sell luvverly heathen eBooks (thus avoiding dead tree sales when possible) via my humble website. Assuming PayPal (*shudder of revulsion*) to handle the filthy lucre as I am not in a position to handle money, I was thinking that perhaps the simplest way to safeguard download of the PDF would be to have it in a directory that was auto-generated every twenty-four (or other) hours, and/or a static directory with a password that jumped every twenty-four (or other) hours. On successful purchase, a password would be sent to the user telling them how and where to download their goodies. The PDF is too large to e-mail, and frankly, one shouldn't e-mail PDF's in any case.^*

Is there a package about to facilitate this? Alternately, can you suggest some alternate, yet droolproof, fulfillment method?

Thanks in advance,

-- Lorrie

^* - I am a sysadmin of the Old Code. E-Mail was designed to transmit message averaging under sixty-four kilobytes. You damn kids, get offa my lawn!

Comments

[wodandis.livejournal.com]

You are a dear.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Thanks--but only if it works. ;)

-- Lorrie

[keristor.livejournal.com]

If your FTP site allows softlinks (transparent to the remote user), how about generating a pseudo-random softlink for each customer to the document, mail them the softlink URL, and then delete it after time-period (the softlink name could contain the timestamp plus the random bit, like many email message IDs do, to make that easy for you). A SMOPPoPP (simple matter of Perl, PHP or Python programming).

[lwood.livejournal.com]

That would be the part where I don't know how to program. 8-(

-- Lorrie

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Oops! I tend to assume that sysadmins are better at script languages than I am.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily so! I can hack up someone else's script, but aside from simple shell scripts I've not written much on my own.

-- Lorrie

[wednesday]

I'm almost wondering if the place you want to be asking this is Ravelry; plenty 'nough pattern designers doing what you want to do, except not with books because instead they're pretty shawls or stuffed ninja bunnies.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Usually, when I buy patterns online, they won't touch the EVIL PDF. I did see something just like this for some crystallography software, though...

-- Lorrie

[wednesday]

Miriam Felton and Anne Hanson spring to mind.

[wednesday]

It also occurs to me that I *think* Zencart supports this stuff.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

(except I can't remember which damned package it was, thus cannot remember who to ask "hey, how'd you do that?")