I’ve been talking to some people about customizing Sharetribe. It’s a big piece of software and there are a lot of moving parts, but many of the people I’m talking to are business folks. They chose Sharetribe because they have a marketplace in mind, and the software is just a tool. However, all tools have their limits.
So, I thought it’d be fun to organize it as a ‘choose your own adventure’. Click the link to learn how to customize Sharetribe’s awesome marketplace software.
Here’s an example of some javascript code I wrote to customize a sharetribe.com marketplace.
This code adds a LinkedIn share button to the listing page.
Comments inline.
window.onload = function () { // make sure you run after the document has been loaded, otherwise you won't have access to jquery.
$( document ).ready(function() {
startcustomization();
});
}
function startcustomization() {
console.log("cust started"); // good old debugging log statements.
var d = document.createElement("div"); // adding a div to hold our stuff
d.className = "listing-tweet-button" // leveraging a existing css class
var s = document.createElement("script"); // inject a script tag
s.type = "text/javascript";
s.src = "//platform.linkedin.com/in.js"; // this code is all from https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share
var textnode = document.createTextNode("lang: en_US");
d.appendChild(s);
var s = document.createElement("script"); // had to inject both script tags, otherwise they weren't executed.
s.type = "IN/Share";
// commented out: s["data-url"] = "http://www.foo.com"; If you wanted to share a different page than the one that the sharebutton was on, you'd use this. The share button defaults to sharing the page it is installed on.
d.appendChild(s);
$(".listing-social").append(d); // find where the other share buttons are, and append our div
}
You can, of course, stack as many interesting custom functions as you’d like into this script. Do make sure you’re hosting the script on an SSL server (an S3 bucket will do fine) otherwise the script won’t be loaded, since sharetribe.com runs SSL only.
I have one instance of Sharetribe’s open source platform self hosted, and I thought I’d share the costs around that.
This is hosted on Heroku. Why? It’s not the cheapest option, but it is the easiest option to get up and running with regard to developer time. It also is what sharetribe.com runs, so there’s less possibility of future incompatibilities. But I understand if you want to do all your own devops stuff (scaling, upgrading the server, backing up the db, etc) to save some bucks.
Anyway, on production, you’ll want to run a 2X dyno for the web dyno, and a 1X dyno for the css_compile and worker dynos. I run 1 2X dyno for the web, and a 1x dyno for the worker tasks. That means about $75/month, plus maybe $5/month for heroku run bash and css compiles. You can obviously scale up the web dynos as you need to.
And here are the addons I’ve found useful:
So, add these all up and you are looking at a running cost of $75+$5+$50+$12+$20 == $162 for a base level heroku install of Sharetribe (plus the SSL certificate, which is another $20, but is a yearly expense). It’s worth remembering that these will increase as you have more traffic and success.
Note, this is for production only. You probably want a staging server. I’ve been able to get by with free dynos for staging, though if you want to support/test full text searches or have a DB with more than 5MB of data in it, you’ll need to pay *something* for staging.
I have recently spent a fair bit of time working with Sharetribe, an open source, MIT licensed marketplace platform that also powers a hosted solution.
First, let me say that the software is the least significant piece of a marketplace (like AirBnB). The least significant! (Check out the Sharetribe Academy for some great content about the other steps.)
But it is still a necessary component. If you can get by with the hosted solution to prove out your idea, I suggest you do so–$100/month is a lot cheaper than hours of software development. There may come a time when you want to customize the sharetribe interface beyond what javascript injection can do. If this is the case, you need a developer. And that developer needs an environment. That’s what this post is really about.
The sharetribe github readme explains the installation process pretty well, but I find it tedious, so I created a quick start vagrant VM. This VM has a sharetribe installation ready to go. I use vagrant 1.6.3 and Virtualbox 5–google around for instructions on how to get those up and running. The guest VM is Ubuntu 14.04. This VM uses rvm to manage ruby versions, but I couldn’t be bothered with nvm. It will install sharetribe 5.8.0 and all needed components.
Assuming you have vagrant and virtual box installed, download the Vagrant file and put it in the directory where you want to work. Edit it and change any options you’d like. The options I changed were the port forwarding (I set it to 3003), networking options, and the amount of memory used (I allocate 4GB).
Then run vagrant box add http://www.mooreds.com/sharetribe/sharetribe-base-mooreds.box --name sharetribe-base-mooreds to download the file. It’s downloading a large file from my (small) server, so expect it to take a while (hours).
Then run vagrant init.
When you can login (password is vagrant if you use vagrant putty or you can use vagrant ssh) you can go to the sharetribe directory and do the following:
origin is your forked repo (and not mine, because you won’t get write access to mine) SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('MyNewPass');mailcatcher --ip=0.0.0.0foreman start -f Procfile.staticThis is running sharetribe 5.8.0, and I’m sure there will be follow on releases. Here’s how to sync the releases coming from the sharetribe team with your current repo. I’ve taken the liberty of creating an upstream branch for you.
This doesn’t cover deploying the code anywhere–I’d recommend this gist. Make sure you read the comments! Or I can install a vanilla version of sharetribe to heroku for a flat fee–contact me for details.
So, I was working a rails4 project today and added an after_create method to a model (call it model A) that checked on a related object (call it model B) to see its state, and if it met a certain criteria, did something to the model A object being created. The specifics don’t really matter, but I was using zeus to run my rpsec tests.
This caused three tests to fail in entirely unrelated sections of the application.
What on earth was going on?
Well, first I used git bisect to determine the exact commit that caused the issue. (As far as I’m concerned, the existence of git bisect confirms my belief to ‘commit early, commit often’).
Then I dug in. It appears that each of the tests was tweaking the model B object, and testing some aspect of the change, usually through the model A object. Before I added the after_create method, the model B object wasn’t loaded into the ActiveRecord in memory network graph tied to the model A object when the test saved the model A object initially, but was loaded from the database when the method under test executed.
After the after_create method was added, the model B object was loaded into the in memory network graph tied to the model A object. Then the test tweaked the model B object in the database, but didn’t reload the model A object, which had a dirty/old version of the model B object.
A simple reload of model A (and its network graph) fixed it (or a repositioning of when I modified the model B object), but it was quite a subtle testing bug to track down.
I have using the excellent Sharetribe framework to build a marketplace for food businesses and commercial kitchens for my new startup, The Food Corridor. However, it didn’t have support for generating a sitemap.xml file for all the listings available.
How is someone going to find the right kitchen space when they use google, but we don’t have a sitemap so google can keep apprised of all the options?
This wouldn’t do. So, I added the ability to generate a sitemap for all the listings in the marketplace.
First off, install the gem–I used sitemap_generator as it seemed to do what I needed–allow me to call out certain routes and add them to my sitemap. Then you need to create a configuration file, at config/sitemap.rb. Mine looks like:
SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.default_host = "https://"+APP_CONFIG.domain
SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.create do
Listing.where(deleted: false, open: true).find_each do |listing|
add listing_path(listing), :lastmod => listing.updated_at
end
end
Then I just ran bundle exec rake sitemap:refresh:no_ping and a sitemap.xml.gz was generated in my public directory.
If you are running on AWS or someplace else with a persistent filesystem, you can skip to the text starting with “Then, I scheduled”.
If you are running on a PAAS like Heroku, where you don’t get a persistent filesystem, you’ll want to push this generated file to a persistent place. I chose S3. Since sharetribe already has paperclip as a dependency, I used the instructions here and here, with a few modifications for sharetribe.
My rake task to upload the sitemap file was:
require 'aws'
namespace :sitemap do
desc 'Upload the sitemap files to S3'
task upload_to_s3: :environment do
s3 = AWS::S3.new(
access_key_id: ENV['aws_access_key_id'],
secret_access_key: ENV['aws_secret_access_key']
)
bucket = s3.buckets[ENV['s3_bucket_name']]
file = File.join(Rails.root, "public", "sitemap.xml.gz")
path = "sitemap/sitemap.xml.gz"
begin
object = bucket.objects[path]
object.write(file: file)
object.acl=(:public_read)
rescue Exception => e
raise e
end
end
end
I then run the sitemap:refresh:no_ping and upload_to_s3 tasks in the same heroku scheduled task: rake sitemap:refresh:no_ping sitemap:upload_to_s3. If you don’t do that (and instead do separate dynos) then the upload task won’t have access to the file (because it will have been generated on the first dyno’s filesystem).
You also need to make sure to add a sitemap controller to redirect from yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz to the S3 bucket (again, as outlined in the articles linked above.
Then, I scheduled a daily refresh of the sitemap.xml file and submitted the file to relevant search engines.
Things I didn’t do:
I joined Snapchat a while ago. I found tremendous value in the snapstorms by Mark Suster. And some value in the chats from Justin Kan and Gary Vanyerchuk. I’m no Snapchat expert–never made a snap. Just followed people for their stories. But I was interested and was checking the app a couple times a day for a while.
Yet, now I deleted the app from my phone.
Why?
Because even though I was getting value from the media I was consuming, there were two major issues.
I can see why both of these attributes good for content creators–they force the consumer to engage more. More on that here, from msuster. But this consumer is saying goodbye to Snapchat. At least until they give me URLs.
Contracting, like any other business, is all about cash flow. You want to make sure you have more money coming in the door than leaving the door.
A friend of mine once told me that the best advice he had received about running a one person business was that there were three components to the work:
and if you didn’t enjoy all three and treat them equally, you’d be in a world of hurt.
I find this be be very true. Don’t consider contracting if you are only interested in the doing of the work (whether that be development, design, data manipulation, etc). You don’t have to be perfect at the other pieces (getting the work and getting paid for the work), but you ignore them at your peril.
Good ways to get the work:
Good ways to get paid for the work:
If you’d like to learn more about contracting, I am speaking at the June Boulder Ruby Meetup. You can RSVP here.
I am currently working on modifying an existing large rails app. I am customizing some of the look and feel and extending functionality.
The app is under current development and I wanted to be able to take advantage of bug fixes or improvements, without impacting my customizations. Or at least minimizing that impact.
Being fairly new to Rails, I surveyed the landscape and thought that building my customizations as an engine would be a good way to go. (I was wrong, because engines have a hard time reaching out and modifying the application that they are part of. At least that seemed to be a non standard use of engines from what I can find.) The author of Modular Rails has some good blog posts about engines and modularity, so I bought his book.
Pluses:
Minuses:
All in all I am glad I read this book. It didn’t fit my needs, but it didn’t promise that either. I found it a good overview of the engine concept, even if he did do some things in a non standard manner and was a bit verbose about unix commands.
If you have done more Rails development, it will be more useful, and it is a great way to think about building new freestanding applications. I haven’t surveyed the entire rails book landscape but I haven’t found anything out there focusing on Rails engines that is better.
I like LinkedIn, I really do. If you can get past the recruiters randomly spamming you (and yes, I know they are LinkedIn’s primary source of revenue), the professional network is quite powerful.
As Gary Vaynerchuk and Liz Ryan say, you don’t have any excuses for not finding the right person to reach out to with your sales pitch or job interest.
But recently I was contacted by a former colleague who noticed that I had “liked” one of my other contacts’ job posting. He asked a few questions, applied and interviewed, and got the job. I love matching people up with jobs, but this was easy.
My plan is to search LinkedIn periodically and “like” all job listings posted by former colleagues or other trusted sources, and hope this experience happens again.
Follow me on Twitter
Follow me on Blue Sky