I had a little free time yesterday evening so I spent it experimenting with Astra‘s API. Astra is a really cool service created by my talented coworker John Workman. The idea is to provide intelligent cloud storage and CDN services with a straightforward API, with much simpler (and cheaper!) pricing than you get with similar providers.
I am now my own server admin. Cool!
This weekend I took the plunge and set up my own VPS on Linode. The thing that drove me to finally ditch my GoDaddy shared hosting was Git. Git was one of the first tools I was introduced to as a developer at PhotoShelter, and it has completely changed my expectations for a testing environment- not to mention saved my ass more than once. I needed a server of my own where I was free to install the tools I wanted.
If you’ve visited a website that uses car data, like Kelley Blue Book or any number of parts sites, you’ll notice that they tend to rely on a series of menus to help you find the car you’re looking for. At the very least they’ll have menus for the year, make, and model of the car.
I wondered if it would be possible to create something like this on a manually customized PhotoShelter site. There are some PhotoShelter members that focus on automotive stock photography, and it seems like it would be a handy way for clients to find images of a specific car- as opposed to using the traditional search bar.
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A big part of my role on PhotoShelter’s client services team is helping our clients make customizations to their sites. This can range from demonstrating how to use our built-in customization tools, to manually tweaking parts of their sites with CSS or HTML. I was recently tapped to assist with a special project. The goal was to create a special menu on a manually-customized site that would automatically populate with the client’s top-level listed collections. Collections, for those unfamiliar with PhotoShelter terminology, are basically groups of photo galleries (similar to folders).
The client in question was NYCity Photo Wire. It’s a nifty photo wire (stream of news images) run by CUNY’s graduate school of journalism. Here’s the end result.
PhotoShelter’s API is well-suited to this task. Since v3 of the API is still being wrapped up, I decided to stick with v2. The API is able to provide a list of all the top level “listed” galleries and collections. I used a for loop to work through the response, and an if statement to make sure I was only seeing the collections, and not galleries.
Each time it finds a collection, it uses jQuery to append a list item to the new navigation menu. The list item consists of the name of the collection, which links to it. Easy as pie!
I had a problem I wanted to solve at work. Sometimes clients will call or write in asking for help, but they can’t remember which email address their account is under. This is a problem because that’s generally how we look up accounts. We can look them up by their site address (which they usually can remember), but that can take a while, and requires a couple extra steps if they’re using a custom domain. Not something you want to deal with while you have someone waiting on the phone!
Screenshot of the Find User Bookmarklet page
I’d recently discovered that the user ID number can be found in the source code of almost any member site. While this number is pretty innocuous, it can be used to perform a search in our administrative back end.
From that, the path was clear. Create a bookmarklet that searches the source code for a user ID and, if found, directs the visitor to their account in our admin site. My department (client services) has found it pretty useful, so I’ve shared it with our prod and development teams too. This is the first time I’ve created a tool that is actively being used by others.