mmm shipping

It was a hot one today so got our for a 2 hour ride in the afternoon. Rode some roads around Golden for a bit then up Lookout Mtn. Took it fairly easy and didn't time it this time around. I've had a bit of a cold lately and now I can feel it in my chest.
Last weekend the Riptide team swam at a meet in Englewood. The pool was friggin' 4 ft deep so I wasn't about to down off the blocks since I've only practiced that about 10 times and I always seem to dive 10ft down. It was a hard effort and I swam a 19:50. Still felt a bit off from my cold but it probably didn't make much of a difference. Everyone on the team swam well so we celebrated with some beers in Cherry Creek after as proper athletes should.
I've been working away lately on writing PHP code to solve our shipping situation at MileHighAthletic.com. We've been using Paypal to get the order information to copy and paste into UPS Worldship. It's not a terrible way to do the shipping but there's wasted time involved in clicking around the Paypal site (Paypal has some slow a$$ servers) and copying and pasting the info for each order. When there's 25 skis to ship all this makes it a huge hassle.
As usual the PHP code is turning out to be more involved that initially expected and I'm up to about 600 lines of code at this point. Most of the difficulty is that Paypal's API doesn't give you basic info such as what type of order a transaction is (eBay, Website Order, Telephone Order) so I had to come up with some creative ways of determining this. This is important because what a customer actually ordered is sent in a variety of fields depending upon the type of order. Once I get all the info I can populate a database with the info. From there the shipper can pull up what needs to be shipped and everything needed is displayed - essentially what items were ordered. Fill in the height, weight, etc on that page and do this for every order. At the end just hit submit and that info goes into the database and an XML file is saved on the computer which UPS Worldship will read to process all the orders.
It's turning out to be pretty sweet and it's going to speed up our shipping big time. There's a bunch of other problems that can be solved with this. If a customer wants an item shipped on a certain date then that can be entered and the item won't appear in the "To Ship" list until that date. Right now I just have to finish things off and write the code that will create the UPS file.