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Some great press for College District

By Ron Phipps
January 5, 2012

College District has been getting some positive press lately, the most recent being a Forbes article which talks about the success they have been seeing in the last few years.

College District is a company that sells collegiate merchandise to fans. They got their start focusing on the LSU Tigers at TigerDistrict.com and have branched out to teams such as the Oregon Ducks and Alabama Roll Tide.

We’ve been working with Jared Loftus at College District for over four years. College District is running on a heavily modified Interchange system with some cool Postgres tricks. The system can support a nearly unlimited number of sites, running on 2 catalogs (1 for the admin, 1 for the front end) and 1 database. The key to the system is different schemas, fronted by views, that hide and expose records based on the database user that is connected. The great thing about this system is that Jared can choose to launch a new store within a day and be ready for sales, something he has taken advantage of in the past when a team is on fire and he sees an opportunity he can’t pass up.

We are currently preparing for a re-launch of the College District site that will focus on crowd-sourced designs. …

Automating removal of SSH key patterns

By Brian Buchalter
January 3, 2012

Every now and again, it becomes necessary to remove a user’s SSH key from a system. At End Point, we’ll often allow multiple developers into multiple user accounts, so cleaning up these keys can be cumbersome. I decided to write a shell script to brush up on those skills, make sure I completed my task comprehensively, and automate future work.

Initial Design and Dependencies

My plan for this script is to accept a single argument which would be used to search the system’s authorized_keys files. If the pattern was found, it would offer you the opportunity to delete the line of the file on which the pattern was found.

I’ve always found mlocate to be very helpful; it makes finding files extremely fast and its usage is trivial. For this script, we’ll use the output from locate to find all authorized_keys files in the system. Of course, we’ll want to make sure that the mlocate.db has recently been updated. So let’s show the user when the database was last updated and offer them a chance to update it.

mlocate_path="/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db"
if [ -r $mlocate_path ]
then
    echo -n "mlocate database last updated: "
    stat -c %y $mlocate_path
    echo -n "Do you …

Interchange Search Caching with “Permanent More”

By Mark Johnson
January 2, 2012

Most sites that use Interchange take advantage of Interchange’s “more lists”. These are built-in tools that support an Interchange “search” (either the search/scan action, or result of direct SQL via [query]) to make it very easy to paginate results. Under the hood, the more list is a drill-in to a cached “search object”, so each page brings back a slice from the cache of the original search. There are extensive ways to modify the look and behavior of more lists and, with a bit of effort, they can be configured to meet design requirements.

Where more lists tend to fall short, however, is with respect to SEO. There are two primary SEO deficiencies that get business stakeholders’ attention:

• There is little control over the construction of the URLs for more lists. They leverage the scan actionmap and contain a hash key for the search object and numeric data to identify the slice and page location. They possess no intrinsic value in identifying the content they reference.
• The search cache by default is ephemeral and session-specific. This means all those results beyond page 1 the search engine has cataloged will result in dead links for search users who try to land directly on the …

Importing Comments into Disqus using Rails

By Brian Buchalter
December 27, 2011

It seems everything is going to the cloud, even comment systems for blogs. Disqus is a platform for offloading the ever growing feature set users expect from commenting systems. Their website boasts over a million sites using their platform and offers a robust feature set and good performance. But before you can drink the Kool-Aid, you’ve got to get your data into their system.

If you’re using one of the common blog platforms such as WordPress or Blogger, there are fairly direct routes Disqus makes available for automatically importing your existing comment content. For those with an unsupported platform or a hand-rolled blog, you are left with exporting your comments into XML using WordPress’s WXR standard.

Disqus leaves a lot up to the exporter, providing only one page in there knowledge base for using what they describe as a Custom XML Import Format. In my experience the import error messages were cryptic and my email support request is still unanswered 5 days later. (Ok, so it was Christmas weekend!)

So let’s get into the nitty gritty details. First, the sample code provided in this article is based on Rails 3.0.x, but should work with Rails 3.1.x as well. Rails 2.x …

Labeling input boxes including passwords

By Ron Phipps
December 23, 2011

I’m currently working on a new site and one of the design aspects of the site is many of the form fields do not have labels near the input boxes, they utilize labels that are inside the input box and fade away when text is entered. The label is also supposed to reappear if the box is cleared out. Originally I thought this was a pretty easy problem and wrote out some jQuery to do this quickly. The path I went down first was to set the textbox to the value we wanted displayed and then clear it on focus. This worked fine, however I reached a stumbling block when it came to password input boxes. My solution did not work properly because text in a password box is hidden and the label would be hidden as well. Most people would probably understand what went in each box, but I didn’t want to risk confusing anyone, so I needed to find a better solution

I did some searching for jQuery and labels for password inputs and turned up several solutions. The first one actually put another text box on top of the password input, but that seemed prone to issue. The solution I decided to ultimately use is called In-Fields Labels, a jQuery plugin by Doug Neiner. In this solution Doug has floating labels …

Converting CentOS 6 to RHEL 6

By Jon Jensen
December 22, 2011

A few years ago I needed to convert a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 development system to CentOS 5, as our customer did not actively use the system any more and no longer wanted to renew the Red Hat Network entitlement for it. Making the conversion was surprisingly straightforward.

This week I needed to make a conversion in the opposite direction: from CentOS 6 to RHEL 6. I didn’t find any instructions on doing so, but found a RHEL 6 to CentOS 6 conversion guide with roughly these steps:

yum clean all
mkdir centos
cd centos
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.0/os/x86_64/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.0/os/x86_64/Packages/centos-release-6-0.el6.centos.5.x86_64.rpm
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.0/os/x86_64/Packages/yum-3.2.27-14.el6.centos.noarch.rpm
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.0/os/x86_64/Packages/yum-utils-1.1.26-11.el6.noarch.rpm
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.0/os/x86_64/Packages/yum-plugin-fastestmirror-1.1.26-11.el6.noarch.rpm
rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
rpm -e --nodeps redhat-release-server
rpm -e yum-rhn-plugin rhn-check rhnsd rhn-setup rhn-setup-gnome
rpm -Uhv --force *.rpm
yum upgrade

I then put …

Rails Request-Based Routing Constraints in Spree

By Brian Gadoury
December 21, 2011

I recently adopted an unreleased ecommerce project running Spree 0.60.0 on Rails 3.0.9. The site used a Rails routing constraint and wildcard DNS to dynamically route subdomains to the “dispatch” action of the organizations_controller. If a request’s subdomain component matched that regular expression, it was routed to the dispatch method. Here’s the original route:

match '/' => 'organizations#dispatch', :constraints => { :subdomain => /.+/ }

The business requirement driving this feature was that a User could register an Organization by submitting a form on the site. Once that Organization was marked “approved” by an admin, that Organization would become accessible at their own subdomain—​no server configuration required.

For marketing reasons, we decided to switch from subdomains to top-level subdirectories. This meant RESTful routes (e.g. domain.com/organizations/143) wouldn’t cut it. In order to handle this, I created a routing constraint class called OrgConstraint. This routing constraint class works in tandem with a tweaked version of that original route.

match '*org_url' => 'organizations#show', :constraints => OrgConstraint.new …

Modifying Models in Rails Migrations

By Sonny Cook
December 20, 2011

As migrations have piled up in projects that I work on, one problem seems to come up fairly consistently. New changes to models can break migrations.

This can happen a number of different ways. One way is to break old migrations. Another is for the changes to be made to the file before the migration is run (timing issues with version control).

While these can be (and usually are) considered coordination rather than technical issues, sometimes you just need to handle them and move on.

One case I’d like to cover here is removing or changing associations. At the time the migration is expected to run, the file for the model class will have been updated already, so it is hard use that in the migration itself, even though it would be useful.

In this case I found myself with an even slightly trickier example. I have a model that contains some address info. Part of that is an association to an external table that lists the states. So part of the class definition was like so:

Class Contact 
 belongs_to :state
 ...
end

What I needed to do in the migration was to remove the association and introduce another field called “state” which would just be a varchar field representing the state part …