OnMyList Blog

At OML we use Amazon S3 for storage, when we launched the site Gravatar was very unreliable so we had to roll our own with attachment_fu, and it worked fairly well.

With our redesign we want to make all avatars square coz the site looks better that way, so I added a JavaScript image cropper to help you crop your uploaded pictures into squares. It didn’t take long to write and it worked fine in my local development machine. But I was using file_system in attachment_fu locally instead of S3. (Now in retrospect I should’ve setup my own test bucket on S3)... I switched it to S3 on the beta site and it stopped working, that is, the images don’t get cropped properly! After about 10 hours of tracing through attachment_fu and trying silly things such as writing my own with_image override in s3_backend.rb, in the end I only had to add a single line and a minor change. Here are the before and after code…

before:

  def crop2square(args)
    image2crop = find_or_initialize_thumbnail(:full)
    image2crop.with_image do |img|
      @data = img.crop("#{args[:width]}x#{args[:height]}+#{args[:x1]}+#{args[:y1]}")
    end
    attachment_options[:thumbnails].each { |suffix, size| create_or_update_thumbnail(@data, suffix, *size) }
  end

after:

  def crop2square(args)
    image2crop = find_or_initialize_thumbnail(:full)
    image2crop.temp_path = image2crop.create_temp_file
    image2crop.with_image do |img|
      @data = img.crop("#{args[:width]}x#{args[:height]}+#{args[:x1]}+#{args[:y1]}")
    end
    attachment_options[:thumbnails].each { |suffix, size| create_or_update_thumbnail(@data.path, suffix, *size) }
  end

I don’t really feel like explaining why this works right now, and if you’re having the same problem I’m sure you won’t care either and you just want to copy and paste the code and move onto your next problem.

Hope this helps…

At OML we use Amazon’s S3 for profile pics storage, we switched from local disk to S3 for scalability reasons when we need to move to multiple app servers or Amazon EC2. To implement S3 with attachment_fu was fairly straight-forward. However, we ran into a lot of problems with the aws-s3 gem. Basically the S3 backend, which uses aws-s3, failed with a broken pipe.

I did a bit of googling on this and found out the author of aws-s3 attempted to fix this in the latest subversion snapshot (# attempts changed to 10 by yours truly):

rescue Errno::EPIPE, Timeout::Error, Errno::EPIPE, Errno::EINVAL
    @http = create_connection
    attempts == 10 ? raise : (attempts += 1; retry)
end

So I checked out the latest SVN snapshot as a plugin, but it didn’t quite fix it, from time to time I still got the same error. So I ended up retrying it a couple more time in my own rescue block, if it still fails, then catch the exception and fail gracefully.

It seems to work for me, feel free to post comments if you are still having problems with profile pics… It would be great if you would also email the pics you tried to upload to feedback@onmylist.com

Thanks! Now go list your pants off!