Our Blog

Usability: Don’t Make Me Think and a Bookmarklet

By Steph Skardal
August 13, 2015

Hi! Steph here, former long-time End Point employee now blogging from afar as a software developer for Pinhole Press. While I’m no longer an employee of End Point, I’m happy to blog and share here.

I’m only about a quarter of the way into Don’t Make Me Think (Revised) by Steve Krug, but I can already tell it’s a winner. It’s a great (and quick) book about web usability, with both high level concepts and nitty gritty examples. I highly recommend it! Even if you aren’t interested in web usability but are a web developer, it’s still a quick read and would be invaluable to whomever you are coding for these days.

A Bookmarklet

The book inspired me to write a quick bookmarklet to demonstrate some high level concepts related to usability. Here’s the bookmarklet:

javascript:(function() {
  var possible = " ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789";
  $('*:not(iframe)').contents().filter(function() {
     return this.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE && this.nodeValue.trim() != '';
  }).each(function() {
     var new_content = '';
     for(var i = 0; i<this.nodeValue.trim().length; i++) {
       new_content += possible.charAt(Math …

Bucardo replication from Postgres to sqlite and mariadb using pgbench

By Greg Sabino Mullane
August 12, 2015

"Apples and oranges" image
by Dan McKay

While Bucardo is known for doing “multi-master” Postgres replication, it can do a lot more than simple “master to master” replication (better known as “source to source” replication). As people have been asking for simple Bucardo Bucardo 5 recipes based on pgbench, I decided to present a few here. Since Bucardo allows any number of sources and targets, I will demonstrate a source-source-source-target replication. Targets do not have to be Postgres, so let’s also show that we can do source—​MariaDB—​SQLite replication. Because my own boxes are so customized, I find it easier and more honest when writing demos to start with a fresh system, which also allows you to follow along at home. For this example, I decided to fire up Amazon Web Services (AWS) again.

After logging in at https://aws.amazon.com, I visited the AWS Management Console, selected “EC2”, clicked on “Launch Instance”, and picked the Amazon Linux AMI (in this case, “Amazon Linux AMI 2015.03 (HVM), SSD Volume Type—​ami-1ecae776”). Demos like this require very little resources, so choosing the smallest AMI (t2.micro) is more than sufficient. After waiting a couple of minutes for it …

Streaming Replication time lag monitoring added to check_postgres

By Josh Williams
August 10, 2015

I almost let this one sneak past! Guess I need to do some lag monitoring on myself. About a month or so ago, a new version of check_postgres was released, and that includes a bit of code I wrote. While the patch has been available in the git checkout for a while, now that it’s in the official release and will start appearing in repos (if it hasn’t already) it’s probably worth writing up a quick note describing its reasoning and usage.

What’s the feature? Time-based replication monitoring in the hot_standby_delay action. This was something that had been a long-standing item on my personal TODO list, and happened to scratch the itch of a couple of clients at the time.

Previously it would only take an integer representing how many bytes of WAL data the master could be ahead of a replica before the threshold is crossed:

check_hot_standby_delay --dbhost=master,replica1 --critical=16777594

This is certainly useful for, say, keeping an eye on whether you’re getting close to running over your wal_keep_segments value. Of course it can also be used to indicate whether the replica is still processing WAL, or has become stuck for some reason. But for the (arguably more common) problem of …

Not so popular JavaScript/HTML functionalities

By Piotr Hankiewicz
August 7, 2015

There are multiple things in a front-end developer work that can be easily fixed by a native browser functions. Based on experience, JavaScript learning path for a big part of front-end developers is not perfect. Therefore, I will give you some examples, for some people as a reminder, for others as a new thing to think about. It is always good to learn, right?

document.execCommand

W3C definition

It lets you use built-in browser functions as you wish from JavaScript, simple functions to do simple things. execCommand is very useful when you work with text ranges selected by a user. It’s also popular that it comes together with a contentEditable HTML element attribute.

Practical examples

• You want to have redo button in your application, so when user will click on it, the latest changes will be discarded.

// after running just this, the latest user changes will be discarded (text input changes)
execCommand('redo', false, null);

• You want to remove text after the cursor position.

// after running this script one character after the cursor
// position in a current element will be removed
execCommand('forwardDelete', false, null);

There are more than 30 functions ( …

How To: Big Beautiful Background Video

By Marina Lohova
August 4, 2015

One pretty common request for every web developer is to “please, make our Stone age website look sleek and modern”. Well, no more head scratching about the meaning of “sleek” or “modern” (or “the Stone age” for some?). In times of the crisp and stunning visuals there’s no better way to make an impression than to use a big beautiful background video on the home page.

Paired with some impressive infinite scroll which I already covered here and a nice full-screen image gallery (which I will cover later), it will definitely help to bring your website up to date.

Lucky for us, there is a very popular library called BigVideo.js which is based on another well known library videojs, which is a wrapper around HTML5 <video> tag.

Converting the video.

To ensure the cross browser support, it’s best to supply the desired video in several formats. The most common formats to use are mp4, ogg and webm. Here is the browser support chart to give you a better idea of why it’s so important to use more than one format on your page.

There are a lot of ways to convert the file, but since I’m not particularly good with compression settings or codecs, I’m using the following easy workflow:

• Upload …

Converting from Pivotal Tracker to Trello for project management

By Josh Lavin
August 3, 2015

For larger client projects, I find it helpful to maintain a list of tasks, with the ability to re-order, categorize, and mark tasks as completed. Add in the ability to share this list with coworkers or project owners, and you have a recipe for a better record and task-list for development.

I had been using Pivotal Tracker for this purpose, but I found a lot of its features were too complicated for a small team. On the simpler side, Trello offers project “boards” that meet many needs for project management. Plus, you can accomplish a lot with the free level of Trello.

No import

After being convinced that switching from Pivotal to Trello was the right move for my current project, I was dismayed to find that Trello offers no Import functionality, at least that I could find for front-end users. (They do have an API, but I didn’t relish taking time to learn this.) I could easily export my Pivotal project, but how to get those tasks into Trello cards?

One idea

In my search of Trello for an import feature, I found a feature called Email-to-board. Trello provides a custom email address for each Board you create, allowing you to send emails to this address, containing information for a new …

Perusion has joined End Point!

By Jon Jensen
July 31, 2015

We are excited to announce an expansion of End Point’s ecommerce clientele and our developer ranks! The ecommerce consulting company Perusion has joined End Point. Perusion was founded in 2002 by Mike Heins and Greg Hanson. It quickly became a small powerhouse in the open source ecommerce space, focusing on Interchange, Perl, and MySQL on Linux. We were pleased to welcome Perusion in a merger with End Point at the beginning of July.

Mike Heins is the original creator of MiniVend in 1996. In 2000, Mike’s consultancy and MiniVend were acquired by the ecommerce startup Akopia. With numerous improvements, including the addition of a new full-featured administrative back-office, the new open source ecommerce platform Interchange was created. Akopia was acquired by Red Hat in 2001, and in 2002 the Interchange project became independent, led by its creators and a group of other open source developers who maintain it to this day.

Greg Hanson is a serial entrepreneur and business manager and has worked extensively with data systems of many types. In the mid-1990s he started a computer products ecommerce company, Valuemedia, and oversaw every aspect of its evolution. Greg joined Mike to …

Ruby On Rails: Hash#slice With Default Values

By Kent Krenrich
July 31, 2015

Recently, I needed to add some functionality to an older section of code. This code initialized and passed around a reasonably sized set of various hashes, all with similar keys. As those hashes were accessed and manipulated, there were quite a few lines of code devoted to addressing boundary conditions within those hashes. For example, an if/else statement setting a default value to a given key if it didn’t already exist. With all the added safety checks, the main method dragged on for several screens worth of code. While puttering around amidst this section, I figured I’d be a good little boyscout and leave my campsite better than when I found it.

I figured a fairly easy way to do that would be to eliminate the need for all the extra if/else clauses laying around. All they were really doing was ensuring we ended up with a minimum set of hash keys. I decided to turn all the various hashes into instances of a very simple class inheriting from Ruby on Rails’ HashWithIndifferentAccess along with some basic key management functionality.

My first draft came out looking something like:

class MyHash < HashWithIndifferentAccess
  def initialize(constuctor = {}) do
    super
    self[ …