Booko’s Blogo

Two new shops added – Book Bargains and DVD Pacific. Both look like great additions to Booko.

Along with the new stores, I’ve fixed a bunch of little bugs and added more availability messages to prices (Just hover your mouse over the price – not super obvious I’ll grant )

Another example of high prices in Australia. KitchenAid Mixer. With a RRP in the US of $349.99 USD or $382.67 AUD, Amazon sell it for $290 USD ~ $317.079. RRP in Aus is…. $729 AUD.

Amazon.com Vs Kitchenware Direct

I have nothing against Kitchenware Direct – I’ve bought stuff from them in the past and will do in the future. Just like high book prices, no doubt this has nothing to do with retailers, but probably with distributers. (Publishers in the case of books).

Couple of little fixes, the largest of which is the search functionality is no longer powered by AJAX.  This means the Back button will work correctly after you’ve searched for a book, then gone and viewed a book, then clicked back.  Surprisingly, Safari actually did clever stuff to make this work – clicking back in Safari would take you back to the search results – in every other browser you’d be taken an unexpected page – usually the front page.

Secondly, I’ve added HTML5 attributes to various fields as described by Mark Pilgrim. The most obvious will be to Safari and Chrome users (at least the Mac version) where the search box will have round corners and stuff.  Other fields such as the email entry on login and register, and the OpenID field will now be easier to use on the iPhone, with alternative keyboard making it easier to enter that data.

Let me know what you think.

Logging into Booko just got easier. If you have a Google or Yahoo account, just hit the appropriate button and you’re in, registration included.

Turns out, this was super easy to add to Booko since it already does vanilla OpenID logins. Basically, Booko just fills in the OpenID URL with “https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id” or “http://yahoo.com/” and OpenID Directed Identity does the rest. You could also just type those URLs in yourself and it’ll work just the same.  Sweet!

Hey everyone, Booko has some new features.

User accounts – you can now create an account to save your cart.  Booko accepts OpenID also – so you can use your OpenID provider to log in to Booko.

If you have a Booko account, you can now create additional lists for keeping track of books. For example, you could create a wish list, or a scifi list, or a kids’ book list or a list of all Tintin books. Just go to the “Manage Lists” page and go to town.

Finally, you can make lists public and sharable. Once you’ve created a list, just tick the “Public?” checkbox.  Booko will then create a public URL for you to use.   For example, here’s a list I made of all Tintin comics:

http://www.booko.com.au/lists/view/nx9deGGd9Qgy2SE8

You can copy all the items from any public list into your own cart or into any of your lists.

Let me know what you think.

Shouldn’t be long.

Update: And we’re back. Took a bit longer than expected though.

Tonight I introduced a new shopping cart implementation to Booko. This new cart code is in preparation for allowing Booko users to create lists of books and to enable people to save these lists in their user accounts (coming soon).  The shopping cart will be one of these lists.

The new cart includes the ability to increase the number of any particular title without needing to visit that book’s page.

I wasn’t able to migrate existing carts across to the new system, but any book you’ve viewed recently will show up in the  ”Your Recently Viewed” section.  Enjoy!

I’m working on adding a new feature to Booko, but I accidentally started working on the Git Master branch, which I like to keep sync’d with the production version of Booko. So after a few commits I want to be able to add some fixes to Booko, but I’ve polluted my master branch with untested, unfinished changes.  What to do?

After reading up on Stack Overflow, I decided to fix things.  What I want to do, is reset my master branch to the version in production, and take all the subsequent commits and create a new branch with them.  Turns out, it’s easy.

1. Find the commit you want the master branch to be at. You can find the SHA-1 name with “git log”

2. Create a branch from that commit with: git checkout -b new_master <SHA-1 commit name> (hint: this will be the new master )

3. Rename your current master branch to the new name of the feature: git branch -m master branchname

4. Rename the new_master to master: git branch -m new_master master

And, job done. You’re no longer messing up your master.

There are times I really enjoy using Ruby on Rails.  Recently, Fishpond started 403′ing http requests for cover images if the referrer isn’t fishpond.com.au.  Sites do this so that other sites don’t steal their bandwidth.  Really, Booko should be downloading the images and serving them itself (It’s on the todo list BTW).  Since Booko had been using Fishpond image URLs to display covers, you may have noticed a bunch of missing cover images – some of them are caused by Fishpond’s new (completely reasonable) policy.

So I’ve updated the code so I don’t link to Fishpond images, but now I need to go through every product Booko’s ever seen  and update those with a Fishpond image URL.   This is laughably easy with ruby on rails. Just fire up the console and run this:

Product.find_each do |p|
  if p.image_url =~ /fishpond/
    puts "updating details for #{p.gtin}"
    p.image_url=nil
    p.get_detail
    p.save
  end
end

The Rails console gives you access to all the data and models of your application – and this code, just pasted in, will find links to all Fishpond images, find a replacement image, or set it to nil. Point of interest – Booko has 396,456 products in its database.  Iterating with Product.all.each would load every product into memory before hitting the each – that would probably never return. On the other hand Product.find_each loads records in batches of 1000 by default.  Pretty cool.

* Thanks to http://ryandaigle.com/ to posting about this feature.

While developing new features or bug fixes Booko, I usually work in branches. This makes keeping things separate easy, and means I can easily keep the current production version clean and easy to find.  But when changing branches I often have to restart the rails server and the price grabber to pickup any changes.  For example, if I’m adding a new shop in a branch, when I switch branches I want the price grabber to restart.

Turns out git makes this super easy. You just create a shell script: .git/hooks/post-checkout

That script gets called after checkout. So, mine is pretty simple:

#!/bin/sh

./bin/fetch_price.rb 0 restart;
thin restart

There’s probably a better way to get Thin to reload itself, but this works nicely.

You can checkout all the hooks here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/v1.5.5.4/hooks.html