#152 Catalog Skin
A simple and fast offline Trumpeter model catalog skin, using some nokogiri magic.
Here’s a quick demo..
Notes
these original notes are left as-is, however I have ported this project over to maintain independently at https://github.com/tardate/trumpeter_catalog
Trumpeter 小号手公司 is one of the main scale model manufacturers in China, and their website is not only available in English, but reasonably informative. It is very slow however, and a pain to search.
This is a little weekend project to create a fast and searchable skin for the Trumpeter catalog.
Setup
The catalog runs locally and needs a working ruby installation - I’m using Ruby 2.7.2 but the code is not version-sensitive. Dependencies can be installed with bundler in the usual way, then you are good to go:
$ bundle install
Caching the Catalog
The ./update_cache.rb script builds a local cache of the Trumpeter catalog.
NB: this is sensitive to major changes in the Trumpeter web site, but for now works fine.
$ ./update_cache.rb
[Load Product Pages][2020-12-06 21:29:24 +0800] loaded
[Load Products][2020-12-06 21:29:24 +0800] loaded
[Load Product Image][2020-12-06 21:29:24 +0800] loading skin/cache/images/09592.jpg with a 1 second grace period delay
[Load Product Image][2020-12-06 21:29:24 +0800] loading skin/cache/images/09580.jpg with a 1 second grace period delay
...
Running the Catalog
After updating the cache, the skin/index.html presents a very snappy searchable and filterable listing
of the catalog. It’s a simple web page using some basic Bootstrap and Datatables features with a little custom javascript.
Here’s an example, with a simple search applied. Each entry has links to the main Trumpeter page as well as search links for the product on AliExpress and Google.
Note: the catalog is loaded from JSON file, which presents a security issue if the skin/index.html is loaded
locally as a file in a browser.
In Firefox, the security issue can be overcome by disabling the security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy preference in about:config
Running with Sinatra
I’ve defined a simple Sinatra app in app.rb that can be used to serve the catalog locally over HTTP,
avoiding the browser limitations with loading the JSON data file. Run it with:
$ ruby app.rb
== Sinatra (v2.1.0) has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from Thin
2020-12-06 23:31:57 +0800 Thin web server (v1.8.0 codename Possessed Pickle)
2020-12-06 23:31:57 +0800 Maximum connections set to 1024
2020-12-06 23:31:57 +0800 Listening on localhost:4567, CTRL+C to stop
::1 - - [06/Dec/2020:23:32:06 +0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 - 0.0034
::1 - - [06/Dec/2020:23:32:06 +0800] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - 0.0103
...
