One of the numerous side projects that’s been keeping me from blogging (alongside working full time and preparing for a round-the-world trip and an international move) made a quiet launch yesterday. You can find it over at shop.georgiamusicstore.com.

The site is a component of a wider online presence for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, providing e-commerce facilities for their gift shop. It went through numerous iterations as they refined how they wanted to manage stock, and now takes stock updates uploaded from CSV files for easy integration with their other back-office systems. Payments are handled through the excellent Active Merchant which makes the payment side of e-commerce development a breeze. Search come from ferret, and a little reassurance is provided by the wonderful exception_notification.

I also took the table-based HTML of the main site and reworked it as XHTML and CSS. It may have saved time to just work with the existing templates, but after all these years of avoiding tables for everything but tabular content, it hurt too much not to have a validating front page.

There have already been a few changes made as we load more data in and hit it with real requests, and thanks to the flexibility of rails and capistrano it will remain nice and easy to keep revising as we go along.

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In the process of catching up with some neglected tasks, I’ve pushed out new releases of both of my PEAR packages.

Services_Technorati receives a version number bump, and little else. The alpha release was never meant to last quite this long given that it’s merely a port of a very stable package, and it’s finally marked beta. My hope is that the beta release will pick up a few more users to put it through its paces.

I had wondered about adding in some extra classes to encapsulate responses, but at the end of the day simplexml does a decent job, is well documented, and doesn’t add any overhead, so I’m happy just returning its objects and letting people work with them.

There are also a couple of bug fixes for the stable release of XML_Feed_Parser, kindly contributed by users. There are still a couple of outstanding tickets, but they’re issues which require more thought so I’m postponing them for 1.0.3 or 1.1.0.

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An article I wrote has just been published over at InfoQ. It’s called Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML and shows how easy it can be to extend Rails’ RESTful behaviour to input and output resources not only as XML but also as JSON and Microformatted HTML.

The article builds on some posts on this blog, such as Intercepting Microformats In Rails Input, but offers a bit more context. The timing of the article fits nicely with a post on the microformats-rest list about Rails, REST and microformats, so hopefully we’ll see more discussion of these concepts over the coming weeks.

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With only three and a half months left in Grand Rapids, it’s time for me to start passing along one of my few locally-based responsibilities. Building up Grand Rapids WiFi has been a great way to get to know the city and to learn a few new coding tricks, and I hope to keep enhancing the code, but it needs someone locally based who can keep their finger on the pulse of new wifi hotspots and make occasional visits to keep the site up to date.

So if you’re based in Grand Rapids (preferably the city rather than the ‘burbs, as that’s where most of the hotspots are) and would like to help out, let me know. The minimal advertising revenue to the site doesn’t cover its hosting costs, so there’s no money in it, but it’s really very little work and makes a satisfying little contribution.

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In an effort to tidy up various older projects that were never quite completed, I’ve turned my attention to my first PEAR module Services_Technorati. It’s a very simple wrapper around the Technorati API, but the PHP4 version never reached a stable release as it depended on some other packages which were also never stabilised.

So it seemed time to make the simple step of converting the code to be PHP5-only and use simplexml for their XML parsing. That removes the dependencies which were slowing me down, and should result in improved speed along the way as the XML parsing is now handled in C rather than PHP. I just released 2.0.0alpha1, but the code should be pretty stable and I’m hoping to run through the steps and get a stable release out very soon.

Update (27th Feb): I’ve just pulled this release and re-released it as 0.7.0. Apparently because the package never release 1.0 in its original version, I should just continue with the previous version numbers despite the change to PHP5.

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