So it’s now the second month in the year; January really felt long in my opinion! Maybe it’s because of all the shit which went down *cough* Trump *cough*…fuck it…yeah most likely it’s because of that and all other shit which went down around the world. Leave me in little old St. Lucia.

You know, I’m not from the US but obviously as the super nation(?) of the world whatever happens in the US of A somehow has an impact somewhere else in the world, yes, including here in St. Lucia and the Caribbean at large, but that’s none of my business though …what am I saying…yes it is my business; I want the best for everyone  good luck America maybe 90% of the world is wrong about Trump.

You know there are many limitations placed on the Caribbean. I am not at the level in society to know why these limitations exist but they affect my way of living daily. E-commerce in the Caribbean is extremely difficult, opening an online store which offers credit/debit card payment is a painful procedure. Most big-time-reasonable-trusted payment gateway providers such as Stripe, Authorize.net, Braintree, Paypal Express etc (2% unsure here) do not support Caribbean merchants right off the bat, the process includes runarounds such as getting a US address which I’m pretty sure might be fraud. The one provider I have found which supports Caribbean merchants is 2Checkout, but they don’t make it any easier; you need to fill out an application detailing your business and what type of product you are selling, their prohibited product list basically says *nope…look else where * so your product might still not be supported.

This type of thing is a big problem in the Caribbean. Do you know how it feels to go to a website and click on the “Select Your Country” dropdown list and not find your country? Let that sink in. At least Jamaica usually somehow finds itself on that list  yessi mon.

That concludes my rant on how difficult it is to do e-commerce in the Caribbean, I am not sure who laid these limitations on us…whether it’s other countries or whether the higher ups in the Caribbean making it hard for payment gateways such as Stripe to support Caribbean merchants.

The past weeks have been pretty productive (I don’t mess around after all). I have started working on a major update for Awesome Click to Tweet I’m talking from version 1.x.x to 2.x.x, the update includes a builder which will allow users to build their tweet boxes from scratch instead of using basic premade templates I bundled with it, my design skills usually suck ass so I think giving the user the ability to create their own designs with a live preview will be very useful. Javascript always finds a way to creep into my life  I should learn it…deeply…someday.

Of course there’s more going on, but I don’t like making my posts long, I don’t like reading long blog posts myself afterall.