Strawberry Tuesday

I was struck by the similarities between my TIVO and my freezer after listening to a Radio 4 programme partly about the impact of freezing on cookery in the 70's.

OK so maybe this sounds crazy, but run with me on this one - only for a bit...

The freezer allowed people to keep food for longer, not only that but it enabled a certain degree of flexibility in the consumption of that food. Previously food was preserved, but not preserved in its original state (i.e. with salt or pickled etc.) The freezer enabled food to be stored in as close to original format as possible for consumption at a time of choosing. This was indeed a revolution. Breaking from the need to buy "fresh" or even to buy "in season".

The knock on was to increase the flexbility of people to consume. Later combined with the defrosting ability of a microwave oven - made it quicker to consume - and must have resulted in a significant change in peoples behaviour - and I guess eating patterns.

I hope can see where I'm going on this one...

Like TIVO some things are better to freeze than others. Leaks are particularly awkward since they contain a lot of water and don't have the right structure which means when they are defrosted they tend to lose their form. Current affairs programs lose their freshness when frozen in your TIVO.

Many many people understood and bought into the benefit of freezers, but relatively few made the conceptual leap to TIVO in the UK while it was being offered, and many only make the leap once they have actually used PVR's or a TIVO. Effectively they are converted to its use - getting functionality as part of something else and then realising the benefit later.

Perhaps that's the difference - I don't remember freezers being sold on the basis that they revolutionised your life and eating habits, they were just sold as a way of keeping things for longer and the revolution was perceived as an unintended consequence.

To pitch a product too far into the horizon of peoples expectations is asking a lot, even if there are clear and obvious benefits.

Just my 2 pennethworth.

In the 20 years between the two I think the labeling of the items got a whole lot better with TIVO!

The following is probably an over engineered solution, but a solution nonetheless.

The problem was as follows:

Integrate coppermine photo gallery and an os commerce shop in such a way that products from os commerce can be displayed in the gallery (against a particular picture) and images in the gallery could be displayed against the appropriate products.

In my case the context was a craft web site. So the images in the gallery are projects that people have made with materials that are available in the store. I'm sure that you can see how having an example of the finished product in the shop can help prospective buyers imagine the possibilites for their own projects when browsing through the shop.

I looked at all the contributions relating to coppermine and os commerce, and I needed to do some digging in order to find them.

None of these really seemed to fit the bill, but I did find a contribution for os commerce that provided an XML feed and an equivalent for Coppermine.

The solution was to implement the integration using AJAX techiques. A handler was developed in PHP. This handler receives methods from the Javascript calls, determines the appropriate course of action based on the methods, gets the XML from the appropriate contribution, uses XSLT to translate the XML into HTML, and finally returns the target location and the HTML to the calling page.

It was necessary to modify the osc and the coppermine XML feed contributions so that the output could be filtered, a couple of additional methods were added.

So from the calling page you need to identify the location which will be overwritten by the returning data. In coppermine some DIV's were added with an ID="nameofsection". In OS Commerce I created another infobox, which has a ID attribute attached to a TD tag, rather than use a DIV.

In coppermine I created links to be clicked to activate the AJAX calls. I used the keywords as the search criteria for the XML, so these keywords are passed to the AJAX hander along with the method name (to switch between searching for different things in the XML), a result limit - which isn't fully implemented yet - and finally a XSLT stylesheet for the translation of the XML.

In OS Commerce I wanted the images to display "onload" of the page. Since the body tag seemed to be encoded in the product_info page I had to undo that and manually code it so that it called the AJAX Handler.

The solution has the following advangtages:

1. minimal code changes to each of the products
2. flexible and dynamic integration, without putting both the products in the same database.
3. useful introduction into AJAX

You can find links to the the resources used and the live examples here:
http://del.icio.us/waxingdigital/stajax