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.