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:

• Cleardb for mysql, ‘drift’ level (make sure to be careful about your total db connections–each passenger process uses 5 and ‘drift’ only has 30. $49.99
• flying sphinx for searches, ‘wooden’, $12. We have few enough listings that I’m not worried about deltas yet. $12
• memcachier for caching. Been able to stay at the developer level for now, which is free.
• new relic for monitoring and performance reporting. Been able to stay at the ‘wayne’ level for now, which is free.
• papertrail for logfile review and alerting. Very valuable! Haven’t needed more than 2 days of logs, so am at the ‘choklad’ level, free.
• heroku scheduler, which is essentially cron. Free.
• sendgrid for emails, which lets us send 12k emails for free.
• SSL addon, which lets us serve up the app under SSL with a custom domain name. $20

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.