johndesu

Spree Product Zoom

2012-07-20T00:00:00Z

I rolled out another new Spree Extension this week, spree_product_zoom. This extension adds lightbox zoom functionality for product images with fancyBox.

As always, installation is quite simple. Add the following to your Gemfile and run bundle install.

gem "spree_product_zoom", :git => "git://github.com/spree/spree_product_zoom.git"

Finally, copy over the required javascripts and stylesheets by running the install generator.

rails g spree_product_zoom:install

I hope that this extension is useful. For more details, give the Github Repo a visit.

Spree Social Products

2012-07-06T00:00:00Z

This week I wrote a Spree Extension that allows you to easily add social network sharing buttons, such as the Facebook “Like” button and Pinterest “Pin It” button, to your Spree Product pages. There is support for Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, Google Plus, Delicious and Twitter.

Installing is as simple as adding a line to your Gemfile and running bundle install.

gem "spree_social_products", :git => "git://github.com/spree/spree_social_products.git"

For more details, please check out the Github Repo.

App Recommendation: ReadMore

2012-06-05T00:00:00Z

If you read a lot of books or have a long to-read list, you know how difficult it can be to keep track of what you have or haven’t read. ReadMore lets you create a reading list that keeps track of the books you are reading and your progress through them. The app also keeps track of your reading sessions by allowing you to start a timer every time you read. After a few reading sessions for a book have been recorded, you are able to view various statistics about your pace through the book.

More Information | Buy in AppStore

Build Query Strings with Rack::Utils

2012-05-13T00:00:00Z

A query string is part of a URL that contains data to be passed to web applications. For our purposes I’ll pretend we are working with a Rails Controller and want to customize some redirects to contain additional parameters.

Say we have

redirect_to root_path

which takes us to http://www.mywebsite.com but we would like to pass an aditional parameter along with the redirect, in this case authorization_token. What we want to see is a url like http://www.mywebsite.com/?authorization_token=foo

We could use string interpolation and end up with something like

redirect_to "#{root_path}/?authorization_token=foo"

This is probably fine for a query string with only one key and value, but what if we have a whole bunch of options we’d like passed as parameters? This could quickly grow into a very long string with multiple interpolated values. I’m a fan of succinct and easy to understand code and this is where Rack::Utils comes into play.

We’re going to take a look at two methods provided by Rack::Utils for building query strings, build_query and build_nested_query.

Let’s say we want to build the URL http://www.mywebsite.com/?authorization_token=foo&access_level=moderator&previous=index Using build_query, we can do

  redirect_to root_path + Rack::Utils.build_query(
                           authorization_token: "foo",
                           access_level: "moderator",
                           previous: "index"
                         )

That’s basically all there is to it. I’d recommend taking a look at the source for both build_query and build_nested_query, the latter of which let’s you pass in a prefix as a second argument to build URLs like http://www.mywebsite.com?foo[name]=John&foo[id]=20 with ease.

Time to Try Again

2012-04-05T00:00:00Z

This isn’t my first attempt at trying to run a blog. Hell, this isn’t even my second or third attempt. I originally started blogging about 6 years ago when I was 16. I can’t even remember what most of the content on my blog was about. I just know that I failed. I started out with the best of intentions, but within a few months I lost interest and the frequency with which I posted new articles quickly dwindled. I never had much of an understanding about why I stopped blogging back then, but I feel I do now and think that my new understanding will help me in keeping this new blog fresh and full of content.

When I was sixteen I thought I had a lot to say about technology and web development. In reality I was still a newbie developer and was busy with school and other extracurricular activities. I had a lot of passion though (which I believe I still have) and started a lot of projects, my old blog being one of them. What I didn’t have was the time or self control to finish what I started and keep my blog up to date.

A lot of things have changed in the past few years though that I believe will help me succeed with my blogging endeavors this time around. I won’t dive into specifics now but you can find out more about me here. Instead I’d like to finish this first entry with my goals for this blog and my reasoning for starting it.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking of ways to expand my knowledge as a developer. Coming up with a technical reading list and keeping track of things I’d like to learn has been a large part of it, but I think that keeping track of my learning experiences and sharing them with others could be the most important step.

So, here’s to me starting anew with my blogging efforts.