ActiveProduct — Just the Spree Products
By Sonny Cook
March 28, 2011
ActiveProduct
I wanted to see how difficult it would be to cut out the part of Spree that makes up the product data model and turn it into a self sufficient Rails 3 engine. I followed the tutorial here to get started with a basic engine plugin. Since it sounded good and nobody else seems to be using it, I decided to call this endeavor ActiveProduct.
Which Bits?
The next step was to decide which parts I needed to get. Minimally, I need the models and migrations that support them. If that works out, then I can decide what to do about the controllers and views later.
That said, the lines between what is needed to create a product and the rest of the system are not always so clear cut. You have to cut somewhere, though, so I cut like this:
- Image
- InventoryUnit
- OptionType
- OptionValue
- ProductGroup
- ProductOptionType
- ProductProperty
- Product
- ProductScope
- Property
- Prototype
- Variant
Models
Each of these has a model file in spree/core/app/models, which I just copied over to the app/models directory of my engine.
Migrations
It’d be convenient if I could have just carved the appropriate parts out of the schema.rb file for the migration. But said file does not appear to be in evidence. Building …
ecommerce rails spree
Referral Tracking with Google Analytics
By Steph Skardal
March 25, 2011
It’s pretty easy to use Google Analytics to examine referral traffic, including using custom referral tracking codes. Here’s how:
Once you have referrers or affiliates that plan to link to your site, you can ask that those affiliates append a unique tracking ID to the end of the URL. For example, I’ll use the following referral ID’s to track metrics from Milton and Roger’s websites to End Point’s site.
After you’ve seen some traffic build up from those affiliates, you must create two Custom Advanced Segments in Google Analytics:
|
|
| Follow the link to create an Advanced Segment. | The New Advanced Segment page. |
Once you’ve landed on the New Advanced Segment page, you create a custom segment by dragging “Landing Page” from the “Content” tab to define the criteria, and set it to contains your unique referral identifier.
 |
 |
| Roger’s Referral Traffic | Milton’s Referral Traffic |
That’s it! You now have custom Advanced Segments defined to track referral or affiliate data. You can select the Advanced Segments from any metrics page:
All traffic compared to referral traffic from Milton and Roger’s sites. …
analytics ecommerce
Lazy Image Loading in JavaScript with jQuery
By Steph Skardal
March 18, 2011
This week I had a duh moment while working on a little jQuery-driven interface for a side hobby.
I’ve occasionally used or attempted to do image preloading in JavaScript, jQuery, and YUI. Preloading images happens after a page is loaded: follow-up image requests are made for images that may be needed, such as hover images, larger sizes of thumbnail images on the page, or images below the fold that do not need to load at page request time. Adobe Fireworks spits out this code for preloading images, which is a bit gross because the JavaScript is typically inline and it doesn’t take advantage of common JavaScript libraries. But this is probably acceptable for standalone HTML files that get moved between various locations during design iterations.
<body onload="MM_preloadImages('/images/some_image.png','/images/some_other_image.png')">I found many examples of preloading images with jQuery that look something like this:
jQuery.preloadImages = function()
{
for(var i = 0; i<arguments.length; i++)
{
jQuery("<img>").attr("src", arguments[i]);
}
}I implemented this method, but in my code the preloading was happening …
javascript jquery
Liquid Galaxy Project in GSoC 2011!
By Benjamin Goldstein
March 18, 2011
We’re very happy to announce The Liquid Galaxy Project has been accepted as a Mentoring Organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Program!
Talented students interested in Liquid Galaxy, panoramic systems, and the opportunity to be paid a stipend of $5000 by Google to develop and enhance open source code should go to the project’s Ideas Page and make a proposal to the project for review:
http://code.google.com/p/liquid-galaxy/wiki/GSoC2011
We look forward to student submissions on these exciting projects that will make Liquid Galaxy an even more impressive system, including:
- Controlling Liquid Galaxy with novel input devices like a Wiimote, Android phone, or Kinect
- Patching other open-source software enabling multi-system panoramic display
- Production of panoramic video, audio, and photography
- Your own innovative idea!
visionport
Product Personalization for Ecommerce on Interchange with Scene7
By Steph Skardal
March 15, 2011
One of the more challenging yet rewarding projects Richard Templet and I have worked on over the past year has been an ecommerce product personalization project with Paper Source. I haven’t blogged about it much, but wanted to write about the technical challenges of the project in addition to shamelessly self-promote (a bit).
Personalize this and many other products at Paper Source.
Paper Source runs on Interchange and relies heavily on JavaScript and jQuery on the customer-facing side of the site. The “personalization” project allows you to personalize Paper Source products like wedding invitations, holiday cards, stationery, and business cards and displays the dynamic product images with personalized user data on the fly using Adobe’s Scene7. The image requests are made to an external location, so our application does not need to run Java to render these dynamic personalized product images.
Technical Challenge #1: Complex Data Model
To say the data model is complex is a bit of an understatement. Here’s a “blurry” vision of the data model for tables driving this project. The tables from this project have begun to exceed the number of Interchange core tables.
A snapshot of the …
ecommerce interchange
Google 2-factor authentication
By Jon Jensen
March 14, 2011
About a month ago, Google made available to all users their new 2-factor authentication, which they call 2-step authentication. In addition to the customary username and password, this optional new feature requires that you enter a 6-digit number that changes every 30 seconds, generated by the Google Authenticator app on your Android, BlackBerry, or iPhone. The app looks like this:
This was straightforward to set up and has worked well for me in the past month. It would thwart bad guys who intercept your password in most cases. It would also lock you out of your Google account if you lose your phone and your emergency scratch codes. :)
I was happy to see this is all based on some open standards under development, and Google has made this even more useful by releasing an open source PAM module called google-authenticator. With that PAM module, a Linux system administrator can require a Google Authenticator code in addition to password authentication for login.
I tried this out on a CentOS x86_64 system and found it fairly straightforward to set up. I ran into two minor gotchas which were reported by others as well:
-
The Makefile calls sudo directly, which it shouldn’t—I was …
hosting linux mobile open-source redhat security sysadmin
Presenting at PgEast
By David Christensen
March 11, 2011
I’m excited to be going to the upcoming PostgreSQL East Conference. This will be both my first PostgreSQL conference to attend, as well as my first time presenting. I will be giving a talk on Bucardo entitled Bucardo: More than Just Multi-Master. I’ll be in NYC for the conference, so I’ll get to work for a couple days at our company’s main office as well.
I look forward to learning more about PostgreSQL, putting some names and faces with some IRC nicks, and socializing with others in the PostgreSQL community; after all, Postgres’ community is one of its strongest assets.
Hope to see you there!
conference postgres bucardo replication
Liquid Galaxy in The New York Times
By Benjamin Goldstein
March 9, 2011
We got a charge at End Point seeing an article on the front page of The New York Times website this last Sunday about the @america cultural center exhibit the US State Department opened in Indonesia this last December. The article features the Liquid Galaxy that End Point installed on Google’s behalf there. There was no mention of End Point, but heck, we’re only a few clicks away from the Liquid Galaxy link in the article!
The article also appeared on page A6 of the publication’s New York print edition, leading off the International Section of the paper with a big 9" by 6" color photo with the Liquid Galaxy in the background—the same photo that appears on the website and at the top of this blog posting.
Kiel Christofferson made the trip from New York to Jakarta to do the installation. After he installed the Liquid Galaxy in the exhibition space he moved it with local help to a ball room nearby where there was a State Department gala for the opening of @america. Kiel got dressed up in black (not so unusual for him) and staffed the booth to make sure there were no glitches for the event, then he oversaw the move back to home base.
This Liquid Galaxy was a bit different …
clients visionport