Advanced Product Filtering in Ecommerce
By Steph Skardal
March 18, 2015
One of my recent projects for Paper Source has been to introduce advanced product filtering (or faceted filtering). Paper Source runs on Interchange, a perl-based open source ecommerce platform that End Point has been involved with (as core developers & maintainers) for many years.
In the case of Paper Source, personalized products such as wedding invitations and save the dates have advanced filtering to filter by print method, number of photos, style, etc. Advanced product filtering is a very common feature in ecommerce systems with a large number of products that allows a user to narrow down a set of products to meet their needs. Advanced product filtering is not unlike faceted filtering offered by many search engines, which similarly allows a user to narrow down products based on specific tags or facets (e.g. see many Amazon filters on the left column). In the case of Paper Source, I wrote the filtering code layered on top of the current navigation. Below I’ll go through some of the details with small code examples.
Data Model
The best place to start is the data model. A simplified existing data model that represents product taxonomy might look like the following:
Basic …
ecommerce interchange
wroc_love.rb a.k.a. “The best Java conference in Ruby world”
By Wojtek Ziniewicz
March 18, 2015
Time and Date: 13–15th March 2015
Place: Wrocław University
Amongst many Ruby and Rails talks on this conference, there were some not related to Ruby at all. Since 2013 I have observed a growing number of functional programming topics and concerns. Even the open discussion was mainly devoted not to OOP but to concepts like Event Sourcing or patterns similar to those promoted by Erlang or Clojure.
So let’s enumerate the best moments.
First of all, the “ClojureScript + React.js” presented by Norbert Wójtowicz. The link below points to the presentation that was recorded on Lambda Days. It is a fascinating talk about gigantic technology leap that is going to have a impact on the whole OOP world.
Nicolas Dermine presented Overtone’s implemented mostly in Ruby that’s called Sonic Pi which lets you basically write code that plays music. It is a great tool from which to learn programming and to use to have fun in the same time. It is also a great tool for teachers (both music and programming).
Awesome project! http://t.co/c2NUNpYjwS Coding music in #ruby Thanks @nicoder for your talk #wrocloverb pic.twitter.com/sY4MpqhZlf
— Cecile Veneziani (@cecilitse) March 14, 2015
There was also a …
clojure conference erlang functional-programming javascript ruby
HTTP/2 is on the way!
By Jon Jensen
March 13, 2015
HTTPS and SPDY
Back in August 2014, we made our websites www.endpoint.com and liquidgalaxy.endpoint.com HTTPS-only, which allowed us to turn on HTTP Strict Transport Security and earn a grade of A+ from Qualys’ SSL Labs server test.
Given the widely-publicized surveillance of Internet traffic and injection of advertisements and tracking beacons into plain HTTP traffic by some unscrupulous Internet providers, we felt it would be good to start using TLS encryption on even our non-confidential public websites.
This removed any problems switching between HTTP for most pages and HTTPS for the contact form and the POST of submitted data. Site delivery over HTTPS also serves as a ranking signal for Google, though presumably still a minor one.
Doesn’t SSL/TLS slow down a website? Simply put, not really these days. See Is TLS Fast Yet? for lots of details. And:
Moving to HTTPS everywhere on our sites also allowed us to take advantage of nginx’s relatively new SPDY (pronounced “speedy”) capability. SPDY is an enhancement to HTTPS created by Google to increase web page delivery time by compressing headers and multiplexing many requests in a single TCP connection. It is only available on …
networking sysadmin compression
Cross Release APT Managment aka How to Watch Netflix on Debian 7 Wheezy
By Bryan Berry
March 11, 2015
Native Netflix video streaming has come to GnuLinux! …if you have the correct library versions.
I am currently running GNU-Linux Debian 7 Wheezy with OpenBox. I really enjoy this lightweight, speedy and easily customized window manager (OpenBox uses simple XML configuration files). So I was also pretty excited when Netflix added HTML5 streaming support and read that folks were proclaiming success in Google Chrome browsers without necessitating any agent masking workarounds.
However, I found I was still getting errors when attempting to stream video in Chrome. The forums I was reading were reporting that when using the Chrome 36+ browser, Netflix would allow Linux streaming. Most all of these forums were based in a Ubuntu 14.04+ environment. Nevertheless, I found a hint as to how to proceed in Debian after reading this article regarding libnss:
“Netflix streams its video in HTML5, but uses a technology called Encrypted Media Extensions to prevent piracy. These extensions in turn require a set of libraries called Network Security Services that the browser can access.”
Debian Wheezy’s repo list maxed out at libnss3==2:3.14 and I would need libnss3==2:3.16+ in order to pass …
debian html linux
On End Point’s Development Environment
By Steph Skardal
March 11, 2015
A few recent conversations have sparked my interest in writing up a blog post that summarizes the familiar elements of our development environments. The majority of End Pointers work remotely, but many of the tools listed below are common to many developers.
- ssh/sftp: We do primarily remote development. Many of us are familiar with local development, but remote development with camps (see next point) is typically the most efficient arrangement in working with multiple development instances that are accessible to clients for testing and staging.
- camps: DevCamps are a tool specific to and created by End Point, which are development instances with an entire webserver, database, and app server stack, similar to containers like Docker. Check out the DevCamps website for more information.
- vim/emacs/nano: While most of our employees use vim or emacs for command-line editors, nano is an inefficient but easy to use editor that we can suggest to new developers. Not many of us use IDEs, if at all.
- screen/tmux: screen and tmux are our preferred terminal multitasking and sharing.
- command-line database interaction (specifically psql and mysql ad-hoc querying): Working with an SQL database …
company environment tools remote-work
Postgres searchable release notes—one page with all versions
By Greg Sabino Mullane
March 11, 2015
The inability to easily search the Postgres release notes has been a long-standing annoyance of mine, and a recent thread on the pgsql-general mailing list showed that others share the same frustration. One common example when a new client comes to End Point with a mysterious Postgres problem. Since it is rare that a client is running the latest Postgres revision (sad but true), the first order of business is to walk through all the revisions to see if a simple Postgres update will cure the problem. Currently, the release notes are arranged on the postgresql.org web site as a series of individual HTML pages, one per version. Reading through them can be very painful—especially if you are trying to search for a specific item. I whipped up a Perl script to gather all of the information, reformat it, clean it up, and summarize everything on one giant HTML page. This is the result: https://bucardo.org/postgres_all_versions.html
Please feel free to use this page however you like. It will be updated as new versions are released. You may notice there are some differences from the original separate pages:
- All 270 versions are now on a single page. Create a local greppable version with: …
database postgres
SCaLE 13x
By Jacob Minshall
March 4, 2015
I recently went to the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE). It takes place in Los Angeles at the Hilton, and is four days of talks, classes, and more, all focusing around Linux. SCaLE is the largest volunteer run open source conference. The volunteers put a lot of work into the conference, from the nearly flawless wireless network to the AV team making it as easy as plugging in a computer to start a presentation.
One large focus of the conference was the growing DevOps community in the Linux world. The more DevOps related talks drew the biggest crowds, and there was even a DevOps focused room on Friday. There are a wide range of DevOps related topics but the two that seemed to draw the largest crowds were configuration management and containerization. I decided to attend a full day talk on Chef (a configuration management solution) and Docker (the new rage in containerization).
The Thursday Chef talk was so full that they decided to do an extra session on Sunday. The talk was more of an interactive tutorial than a lecture, so everyone was provided with an AWS instance to use as their Chef playground. The talk started with the basics of creating a file, installing a package, and …
chef conference containers docker open-source
Working with Annotator: Part 2
By Steph Skardal
March 4, 2015
A while back, I wrote about my work on Ruby on Rails based H2O with Annotator, an open source JavaScript library that provides annotation functionality. In that article, I discussed the history of my work with annotations, specifically touching on several iterations with native JavaScript functionality developed over several years to handle colored highlight overlapping on selected text.
Finally, last July we completed the transition to Annotator from custom JavaScript development, with the caveat that the application had quite a bit of customization hooked into Annotator’s easily extensible library. But, just a few months after that, I revisited the customization, described in this post.
Separation of UI Concerns
In our initial work with Annotator, we had extended it to offer a few additional features:
- Add multiple tags with colored highlights, where content can be tagged on the fly with a color chosen from a set of predefined colors assigned to the tag. Text would then be highlighted with opacity, and colors combined (using xColor) on overlapping highlights.
- Interactive functionality to hide and show un-annotated text, as well as hide and show annotated text with specific tags. …
javascript rails