It’s been a long time since I printed a web page (partially because I’m cheap and don’t like changing ink jet cartridges). However, printing a page doesn’t have to be a pain if the designer took a little extra time and made a “print.css” stylesheet. Print.css when applied correctly can make a web page easy to read and ink efficient.

Let’s take for instance the 26AM blog which you’re reading right now. We’ve created a print.css file that does the following:

• Changes the background to white
• Uses Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif fonts
• Removes all menus, the search bar, sidebar, header images
• Adds print friendly titles and headers
• Adds copyright information and the date/time stamp.

The first step is instructing the browser to use Print.css when a person chooses to print the document. We added the following line to our HEAD tag.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.26am.com/wp-content/themes/26AM/print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

Of course for your purposes, you’ll want to set the HREF to your newly created print.css file. The second step is filling in the Print.css file. Ours looks like this:

/* 26AM Print Styles */
@media print {
	body {
		font-family: arial;
		font-size: 11pt;
	}
 
	#header {
		display: none;
	}
 
	a, a:visited, a:active {
		color: #09C;
	}
 
	#printheader {
		display: block;
		background: #29ABE2;
		padding: 10px;
		margin: 1em 0 1em;
	}
 
	#printfooter {
	font-size: 10pt;
	color: #666;
	border-top: 1px solid gray;
	margin: 2em 0 0;
	padding: 1em 0;
	}
 
 	.breadcrumb {
		font-size: 9pt;
		margin: 0 0 1em;
	}
 
	img.authoravatar {
		display: none;
	}
 
	a.stbutton,
	h2.pagetitle,
	p.postmetadata,
	.respond,
	#respond,
	#sidebar,
	#footer {
		display: none;
	}
}

You’ll see that the majority of what we’ve done is hide things. You’ll also see that we are revealing things as well. We’ve hidden all the unnecessary information that we mentioned above, but then we revealed the printer friendly formatted information such as date and time stamp. Hope this has helped. If you’re working on a project for a client or for yourself, having a printer friendly version of the website can really show your attention to detail and care for the end user. Leave us a note and let us know if this has helped you.

If you’re a Ruby developer (and especially Rails) we’ve all been told REST > SOAP. REST is lightweight, simple, etc. So of course we’ll use REST! So I dug in and implemented the Outbound Use Cases for creating a fulfillment order, checking the service status, and canceling an order. And for months it worked fine. Then one day something changed. I’m still not quite sure what changed, but I started getting back 400 Bad Request responses from Amazon. That was it. No details, no explanations, no clue as to what went wrong, just 400 Bad Request. So after wasting way too much time trying to figure out what wasn’t working (with very little help from Aamzon), I decided it was time to throw in the towel and switch to SOAP. SOAP is by nature more verbose. So I figured that even if the problem was on my end, with SOAP I’d get back more useful error messages in the responses. I was right.

So you’re going to do SOAP in ruby, the natural, default option is soap4r. I’ve used soap4r before, and in the past it had done exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, the simplicity of soap4r caused me nothing but pain when trying to work with the FWS SOAP API. Amazon wants (needs) an <evn:Header> in your soap envelope containing 3 pieces of information: Access Key, Timestamp, and Signature. I know that soap4r supports adding extra headers, but it’s really clumsy. So after an hour or so of getting it wrong with soap4r, I decided it was time to look for an alternative.

Enter handsoap! Handsoap does less for you, *a lot less*, but that also means it’s way more flexible. Flexibility is what I needed. In less than 2 hours from finding handsoap, I had a working SOAP client for the call I cared the most about (creating an order), with nice tests to go with it! Enough babbling, time for some code samples:

I’ll be repeating some of what is in the handsoap getting started guide, but you’ll appreciate having it all in one place. (Do yourself a favor and still read through the handsoap getting started guide).

First create config/initializers/amazon_fulfillment_service.rb with the service endpoint:

# wsdl: https://fba-outbound.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-08-02/AmazonFBAOutbound.wsdl
AMAZON_FBA_OUTBOUND_SERVICE_ENDPOINT = {
  :uri => 'https://fba-outbound.amazonaws.com',
  :version => 1
}

Next, run the generator to create the stubs:

./script/generate handsoap https://fba-outbound.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-08-02/AmazonFBAOutbound.wsdl


Open the file created (probably app/models/amazon_fba_outbound_service.rb)

You’ll want to add your AWSAccessKeyId to the header for all calls:

def on_create_document(doc)
  # register namespaces for the request
  doc.alias 'aws', 'http://fba-outbound.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-08-02/'
  header = doc.find("Header")
  header.add "aws:AWSAccessKeyId", FWS_CONFIG[:access_key_id] do |s|
    s.set_attr "env:mustUnderstand", "0"
    s.set_attr "env:actor", "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/actor/next"
    s.set_attr "xmlns:aws", "http://security.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-01-01/"
  end
end

Next let’s look at the simplest of calls: get_service_status

def get_service_status
  response = invoke('aws:GetServiceStatus') do |message|
    build_headers(message.document, 'GetServiceStatus')
  end
  response.http_response.status
end

Returning response.http_response.status makes the method easy to test (just look for 200). The interesting part of that call is the build_headers method. We need to add the Timestamp and Signature to the Header on a per-call basis. Here’s that method:

def build_headers(doc, action, timestamp = nil)
  @timestamp ||= Time.now.utc.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S") + '.000Z'
  @signature = FwsHelper.aws_encoded(action + @timestamp)
  header = doc.find("Header")
  # Add signature
  header.add "aws:Signature", @signature do |s|
    s.set_attr "env:mustUnderstand", "0"
    s.set_attr "env:actor", "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/actor/next"
    s.set_attr "xmlns:aws", "http://security.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-01-01/"
  end
  # Add timestamp
  header.add "aws:Timestamp", @timestamp do |s|
    s.set_attr "env:mustUnderstand", "0"
    s.set_attr "env:actor", "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/actor/next"
    s.set_attr "xmlns:aws", "http://security.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-01-01/"
  end
end

The signature is built by concatenating the action + timestamp, then creating an HMAC-SHA1 digest of it. Here’s my

FwsHelper.aws_encoded

method:

require 'base64'
require 'digest/sha1'
 
class FwsHelper
 
  def self.aws_encoded(string)
    digest   = OpenSSL::Digest::Digest.new('sha1')
    b64_hmac = Base64.encode64(OpenSSL::HMAC.digest(digest, FWS_CONFIG[:secret_access_key], string)).strip
  end
 
end

That should be enough code to get you moving. If I missed something, or you’d like more elaboration on something, tell us about it in the comments and I’ll update the post.

With that you’ll need to also create a new attribute for your products. Do this by going to:

1. Catalog -> Attributes -> Manage Attributes
2. Add New Attribute
3. Set your attribute code to: “condition”
4. Set the “Catalog Input Type for Store Owner” to “Dropdown”
5. Next, set “Values Required” to “Yes”
6. Leave the rest, as is on this page
7. Go to the Manage Label/Options page
8. Label your titles as “Condition”
9. Choose “Add Options”
10. Place the value of “New” in all fields and select “Is Default”
11. Save Attribute and return to editing your products. Be sure to set all products to the condition of “New”

This is a key step in getting Magento to work with Google Base. If you don’t map the condition, you will come across the error “Google Base – Expected response code 200, got 400″

Drop me a line if this helps! This was tested on Magento ver. 1.3.2.3.

So if you’re thinking about Web 2.0ing (not a real word) your company/site/brand, ask yourself a few questions:

• Will my company benefit from interacting with customers/members/clients through the web?
• Are my clients actually people who use the web to interact? (Most construction companies don’t use the web to conduct business)
• Are there better ways for me to drum up business/awareness for our company?

I’m not against Web 2.0, heck 26AM has jumped on the concept. I am however against trying to make something hip and trendy when it serves no purpose and in fact could potentially hurt a business.

We started off by moving a couple of our open source projects over to github.com. I’ve gotta say, Github is really impressive. Great UI, generous free git hosting, nice pretty graphs… So if we love github so much, why is this an article about setting up your own git server? Because we’re a small company, with lots of projects in our portfolio. The repo to cost ratio on github made it impractical for us to move all our svn repos (which we hosted on our own server) over to github.

I had tried previously to set up my own git server (before finding github), and had gotten bogged down, and after a few hours of poking around the internet decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Then recently a friend of mine showed me me gitosis. Gitosis makes setting up your own git server trivial. Literally 15 minutes later I was up and running with my first git repo on my server. I won’t go into all the details on how to set up gitosos because you can read about it on Garry Dolley’s blog. It took a few more hours to migrate over all our svn repos, but we’re now swimming in the joy that is 100% git usage.

Being a development/design shop, quality control is very important to us. Anything that cuts down the amount of typing and syntaxing is going to benefit our clients and us. The less typing we (26AM, twentysixam) has to do, the less room for error. This also means faster troubleshooting and updates for our clients. SASS creates the possibility for variables within CSS. Why update a color attribution in 10 places when you could update it in one. Why type a definition 4 times when you could do it once?

The beauty behind HAML is that it is an indent based coding style. An indent means a new definition. It’s that simple. It’s been a couple weeks and we’re fans. Some people may think we’re lazy, on the contrary, we’re fast. We want to put out projects faster and more accurately. Because of this fact, we’ve started using HAML.