Life is grand

Up until 5 minutes ago the various online shop providers didn’t interest me. Why would I want to set up my own online shop and attempt to compete in a tight market?

Then I read Read/Write Web’s write-up of Zlio and it hit me; selling your personal recommendations.

There are people out there that you know-of and admire; friends, co-workers, family, friends of friends and even, god forbid, celebrities. Some are widely admired while others only you may admire. You think they have good fashion sense or they always seem to buy the right car or the right digital camera or read the right books and buy the right mobile phones. Call them influencer’s if you wish.

These are the people you want to ask for recommendations on products.

That is what I think Zlio and the others can capitalise on. By allowing anyone to setup an online shop they give power to the influencer’s. An influencer could setup a shop that only lists the products that they have bought and used, that they recommend. You, the admirer, can then go along to the shop and satisfy your desire to be like them or at least shop like them. What pen does Philip Roth use? What coffee maker does Jamie Oliver buy? What camera does Michael Reichmann shoot with?

I hesitate though and think this can get ugly quickly. It encourages facile celebrity worship and is easily gamed by celebrities bought out by companies pushing a product.

On the other hand though I think it can enable genuine people to. Think of someone you admire that is unlikely to be a sell out.

Really it is a recommendation system with a product supply chain and checkout functionality.

So Read/Write Web has setup a shop, the Ruby on Rails guys can do so too and you can too.

Your brain, your tastes and common sense, your sense of what works and what doesn’t, you can sell that with Zlio.

(code and slides)
Dan Webb’s Unobtrusive Ajax With Rails talk proved so popular yesterday that it is being redone in the main hall during lunch today.

Unobtrusive Ajax (or JavaScript really) is all about removing all those inline onclick=”return myFunc(an_id)” bits of code from your HTML and into your JS. Separating behaviour and mark-up. Attaching behaviour to your class definitions e.g. class=”productbutton”.

At the very least this makes your pages smaller (think of a 1000 item list which has onclicks inline vs. attached via a class in a separate JS.)

At the most it is the idea of the class assigned to HTML elements.

A big theme is graceful degredation for when JS is not available.

A good point is around a href=”#” which semantically and functionally doesn’t make sense. I am an offender here but aim to change.

button_to is a little known Rails helper that generates a button in a form. This is for when you should be using buttons and not links e.g. for delete links. Remember, links should not have side effects (if for no other practical reason than avoiding pre-fetch technologies like the Google Toolbar that will wipe your records.)

To get started with UJS checkout the Rails plugin at ujs4rails.com.

A good talk and as Dan says, it isn’t rocket science. It has obvious benefits even if you don’t care about semantics. Hopefully Rails takes the ideas into the trunk.

(slides)

Now at the shopping.nouvelobs.com ecommerce talk which is a large news site in France. Speaker is Gwendal Rou, very French.

ModelSearch is an extension of find that allows something like this:

search = ProductSearch.new()
search.buyable = true
search.Find(:all)

The idea is that searching with multiple columns is not at the usual high-level in Rails. You have to use SQL.

ModelSearch is capable of; Televisions costing less than 300, sorted by price.

search = ProductSearch.new
search.keyword - 'television'
search.max_price = 300
search.sort = :price
search.find(:all)

That is quite handy. I assume ‘max_’ is dynamically added onto model members. i.e. I assume you could have min_price too. My assumption is nearly correct, you just need to set it up in the model a bit.

A further extension lets you pass the search object into the normal model find e.g. Product.find(:all, search.find_options)

ProductSearch is a class you subclass from ModelSearch and setup with various params. e.g. search_key :keyword, :search => :keyword, in => [:name, :description]

All nicely model based this. Buyable, from the first code, is a custom method in the ProductSearch model. It works well with a form, letting you just pass in properly named input fields.

ModelSearch is planned for release soon.

All in all a nice bit of code for real world problems.

Google Checkout has launched and I like it. It is not a direct PayPal competitor as some suggested but instead provides a checkout system for online stores and central place to store payment and delivery details for shoppers. Effectively Amazon could outsource their checkout steps to Google. You could then use your Google Account to buy products from Amazon.

This idea has been floated before but the problem was one of reputation. Google though just may have the reputation to make the idea finally work.

Derek Lakin also made a good point about Froogle. With just one more component (an order-placing system from Google to the store) we could buy directly through Froogle without ever going to the stores website. Google would aggregate multiple store products, show them through the flexible Froogle interface and let you buy through Google Checkout. A common ecommerce interface.

UPDATE

And in another move Google has half-launched Google Account Authentication which is easily described as Microsoft Passport by Google. It isn’t quite the same and Google isn’t even saying it is (they say it is just for add-on functionality to their existing services like GCal and GMail) but you can be sure some sites will use it like Passport. IrishEyes broke the news to me.