January 2012
2 posts
We've Upgraded the "Your Price Watches" Page
First of all: sorting is back. Please let us know what you think in the comments of this blog post.
The main benefit of the redesign of this page should be quite obvious: where we formerly had a list of price watches that could contain the same product many times in a row and often spread across multiple pages, now you should see one row per product with the individual price watches contained...
Wishlist Synchronization Fixed
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had some trouble getting wishlist syncing to work reliably. This is due to the methods through which Amazon forces us to collect the items in wishlists.
Thankfully, we believe we’ve found a solution and expect wishlists to be synchronizing every other day as they used to. Sorry about the inconvenience!
December 2011
6 posts
How Our Price Checking System Works
Given that we regularly answer questions like, “How often does product X have its prices checked?”, we think it’s a good idea to regularly post statistics about our price checking system. This is the first post in that series.
Price Checking Frequency
This depends on a number of things, the first of which is the retailer. Newegg and Best Buy are checked every few hours, and...
Amazon's Holiday Shipping Deadlines
Just a quick reminder that you’re running out of days to place orders at Amazon if you want them to arrive by the 25th of December.
Read all about the US shipping deadlines here. In the UK? Here’s your link.
Good News for Our Amazon Users!
Our users in Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom are now able to access camelcamelcamel using localized domains which forward to the part of our site appropriate for your locale.
Here are the URLs:
Canada - camelcamelcamel.ca
Germany - camelcamelcamel.de
Italy - camelcamelcamel.it
Spain - camelcamelcamel.es
United Kingdom - camelcamelcamel.co.uk
And, to reduce the number...
Amazon's Lightning Deals
Because we get our product data from Amazon’s API, and it does not provide prices for Lightning Deals, we are unable to show these prices on our site. In such cases, we receive and display the normal Amazon price.
Sorry for the inconvenience but this one is out of our hands.
We're Back Online!
One of the main servers in our network decided to die tonight, so we were down for about an hour while we re-installed it. No data was lost, and we were still collecting data during that time, but no web requests were served.
Also, as of a few days ago, we are again able to collect Newegg data. It must have been a temporary bug in Newegg’s system.
Sorry for the inconvenience! I hope our...
Newegg Data is Unavailable
We aren’t sure why but, within the last couple of days, our source of Newegg data suddenly disappeared. As we have been kicked out of their affiliate program, we don’t really have a good way to find out what’s going on. However, we have heard from one brave Camel user that Newegg’s site was down yesterday, so they might just be having temporary problems…
We will...
November 2011
9 posts
Database Issue Resolved
This morning, our database server filled up its storage and took our system down for about 10 minutes. No data was lost, but we did have to log everyone out to clear up some storage space. Everything is now back to normal and running smoothly.
Sadly, these “issue resolved” blog posts are becoming a trend. One we hope to break immediately!
Email Issues Resolved
This morning we had a problem with our server that processes user emails which resulted in no emails being sent. This has been resolved, and all signup and alert emails will be delivered shortly.
Sorry about that! We hope to have these kinks worked out before Black Friday!
Sessions Problems Fixed!
You’ll have to clear your cookies, but otherwise things should be back to normal as far as staying logged in across our various Amazon locales goes. Please comment on this post if you have cleared your cookies and are still being logged out when changing locales.
User Sessions are Acting Strange
Before I go to bed, I want to let everyone know that there is a known bug in our site’s session system which has two side effects: 1) if you login in one locale, you won’t stay logged in when navigating to another locale; 2) login sessions expire much more rapidly than usual. Nothing major, just little annoyances.
Please keep this in mind when using the site in the next 12 or so...
Bug Fixes for our Amazon Locales
We launched some wishlist synchronization bugfixes for the new Amazon locales (China, Italy, Spain.) We also fixed some product URL detection bugs in our search code.
Users in the new locales should now be able to sync their wishlists. And all users will (or should, anyway) appreciate our search engine correctly detecting and parsing product URLs. Hooray for working Camels!
A Summary of Recent Changes
It has been a turbulent couple of weeks for us, but we’ve survived. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
Amazon API Changes
Think of Amazon’s API as our data source. They recently made some changes that effect what data is provided to users of the API. The net result for us is simple: if Amazon has the lowest price on a product, we cannot also get the Third Party New price;...
The Cheapest Days of the Week to Shop Online →
We're Back!
Amazon API support is back online. This means that we are again collecting pricing data for all of our existing locales. Once we’re sure the code is stable, we’ll be launching support for Amazons China, Italy, and Spain.
We’ll post a full follow-up of the recent API changes and their effects on our site soon!
There will be No Pricing Updates this Morning
Amazon officially launched the new version of their API today. Our code to support it is ready, but unfortunately I have to catch an early flight this morning.
Once I land in San Francisco and get home, I will update our servers and things should be back to normal. Until I get home and launch the code, there will be no product updates in any locale. I expect this to happen around 12pm Pacific...
October 2011
8 posts
Please Vote in our Poll
We really want to know what you think about Amazon’s API changes and, specifically, how they will change the functionality of our site and whether that will affect you.
Please vote, it only contains one question!
http://cosmicshovel.polldaddy.com/s/how-will-amazon-s-api-changes-affect-you
And here is some background on the aforementioned API changes, for those who haven’t read our...
What Amazon's API Changes Mean for Us
Amazon has again modified the product pricing data they share with us. We assumed that, although this was going to take place on October 25th, Amazon’s statement that these changes would not be mandatory until February 2012 meant we could continue along as usual and try to find a workaround before February. Wrong! It turns out that Amazon has retroactively applied these changes to all...
Sign-ups are Working Again
Last night around 10pm Pacific time, something went awry with our email system and caused all new user registrations to fail. We’ve spent the last couple of hours working around this problem, and believe we’ve got it fixed.
So, to anyone who tried and was unable to register in the last 13 or so hours, we apologize for the inconvenience and ask that you please give us another chance....
Top Drops Have Been Upgraded
Our Top Price Drops list is now being updated every 30 minutes rather than a few times per day, and should no longer show that “we are regenerating the Top Drops” message while updating.
I think I speak for every Camel user when I say, it’s about time!
Top Drops are Temporarily Unavailable
Our pricing data has outgrown the code that generates our Top Drops list. Unfortunately, this means that the Top Drops are going to be offline until we get the new code ready. We’re actually testing some new ideas right now, so hopefully it won’t be too long before the Top Drops are back.
Sorry about the inconvenience. The homepage sure looks sad =/
Pricing Issues Today
Amazon gave us little noticeable warning before doing some testing of their API (the source of our product and pricing data) today. While we had previously worked around the issues we knew it would cause, parts of the site weren’t yet up-to-date and so some products may have pricing errors, with the most likely error being that Amazon prices will be displayed as “out of stock”...
We've Got New Product and Search Pages!
We’ve been continuing with our plan to redesign the key pages of our site and, so far, progress has been great. Last night we launched two new designs: the product page, and the search results page(s); both of which were designed by Ryan Reed. Thanks Ryan!
The Product Page
Last November, we launched a drastic redesign of most of our site. This effort began with the simplification of the...
Help camelegg stay alive!
This summer, our affiliate account with Newegg — which pays us when you buy products using links on our site — was terminated because we inadvertently broke one of their rules. After fixing the problem, I emailed the affiliate manager at Newegg and begged to be reconsidered for their program. This request (and a couple that followed) was initially met with silence, but today he...
September 2011
5 posts
Blog Comments are Back
After upgrading our blog setup, I found out that the theme I had chosen didn’t support user comments. So I looked around tonight and found one that does, and now you can share your thoughts with us like you used to.
Woohoo!
We'll be posting site and server maintenance notes... →
Discuss the Camel sites and our other projects at... →
Our new blog
For a couple of reasons, including making sure the blog is available when our network is down, we have switched to using Tumblr. It seems like a decent enough platform, and all of our old posts have been transferred over.
A Summer of Updates
Those Camel users with a watchful eye might have noticed that we haven’t posted anything to our blog regarding site updates in quite a while…fortunately (for our developer shame/guilt) there were actually some updates this summer and we got behind on posting about them, so this post contains details on all of the changes we made during Summer 2011.
Wishlist Synchronization
This is a...
July 2011
2 posts
Downtime Today
Earlier this evening, three out of four web servers that power the Camel sites went on strike…resulting in some downtime while I scrambled to figure out the problem. It ended up being nothing major (disks full!) and has now been resolved.
Sorry about that.
Wishlist Importing is Working Again
A bug related to our recent server maintenance caused the wishlist importer to be unable to connect to Amazon and other retailer sites. This has been resolved as of 5pm Pacific time on 2011-07-07. Please try importing your wishlists again, and sorry about the inconvenience. Hopefully this is one of the last maintenance-related hiccups we experience.
Additionally, I will be posting a full...
June 2011
2 posts
Server Maintenance
Our sites will be down on Friday July 1, 2011 as we move our servers to a new datacenter. This will last for a few hours, and unfortunately has to take place during business hours so that we can get help from our ISP if necessary.
Thank you for your patience.
Scheduled Maintenance Tonight!
Tonight (June 19, 2011) we will be doing some maintenance on our servers and so all of the Camel sites will be down for a few hours. This will begin around 11pm Pacific time.
Thank you for your patience! I will post another blog entry when maintenance is complete.
Update - Server maintenance is complete and things went smoothly. Now to get this site update launched… (soon.)
April 2011
1 post
The Camelizer v1.5 is out and supports Firefox...
Just a quick note to say that Mozilla finally pushed our Firefox add-on through their review system and the new version of the Camelizer is now available on their site.
Download it here and get all that Firefox 4.0 support you’ve been craving.
March 2011
7 posts
The Camelizer for Firefox 4.0 - Coming Soon...
I know lots of people are waiting for Firefox 4.0 support in the Camelizer, so I thought you’d all appreciate knowing that I submitted the Camelizer v1.5 to Mozilla tonight. v1.5 supports FF4 and should be released by Mozilla in about 5 days or so, per their add-on review time estimates.
You can get the new version from the add-on page or just wait until Firefox notifies you of an update....
(New user) Form submission bug fixed
Ever see an error like the following when trying to register or submit another site form?
{{attribute}} {{message}}
If so, I apologize for the un-helpfulness of these error messages. A poorly-executed server upgrade left our web servers with conflicting software packages, and this led to the intended error messages not being displayed. Fortunately, I finally managed to fix this problem, so...
The Camel gets recommended by Technologizer
Steve Bass over at Technologizer.com calls camelcamelcamel a “valuable shopping service”. Head over to their site to read the full article.
New features and some site changes
Howdy, Camelinos! We launched some changes last night that may interest you.
Bulk price watch editor
For some time now, registered users have been enjoying the ability to edit big groups of price watches via a single mouse click. But the bulk editor was lacking some key functionality which we’ve just added: changing the email and Twitter notification options. Now you can edit the contact...
Having trouble with product search?
Amazon restricts the number of “live” searches we can send through their site at any given time, and when we get a flood of users searching for products to track, this limit is easily reached. This is because the search box at the top of every page on our site runs through their servers by default.
So, if you notice that search isn’t working, try visiting this page:...
kk.org chooses camelcamelcamel as a Cool Tool
Doug Wong over at kk.org writes:
CamelCamelCamel give me the data I need. If used car salesmen could hand you data-rich, neutral third-party charts like this every time they told you you were getting a steal, it’d go a long way to negating that sleazy image.
And we agree with him! If only all merchants made it this easy to view historical pricing…
As for Doug’s two complaints...
Blacklisted at Amazon: Xbox 360 Live Subscription...
Ever try to find
February 2011
5 posts
TLC Family recommends camelcamelcamel
TLC has rated our site as one of the “10 Best Web Sites to Save You Money”! We came in at #8, under the “Pick the Right Time to Buy” heading, and are quite thrilled with that description, as it perfectly defines how we use the site: before you buy, look up the price history of the product and make sure you aren’t getting ripped off under temporary price hikes!
Read...
Kim Komando picks the Camel as a Cool Site
Radio host Kim Komando chose camelcamelcamel as her Cool Site of the day for February 21, 2011. While her description is somewhat inaccurate — you don’t actually have to register to receive email alerts — we appreciate the linkage.
Read her short post about our site here.
Like folk rock? Check out Buffalo Death Beam's...
So my friend Chris is in a band, Buffalo Death Beam, and that band just released a new album. A really good album, called Salvation for Ordinary People. And this is coming from a guy who wasn’t really into their first album, so maybe that says something about the band’s (or my) growth since the last album. Anyway, Buffalo Death Beam consists of over three thousand (or closer to 8,...
Site update: enhanced product pages and price...
Tonight’s update provides a few changes that feel like natural extensions of the site.
First of all, Camel contributor Ben has been working on this feature request, in which the user desired the ability to organize price watches by folder. Rather than implement a complex hierarchal folder system, we decided that simple labels would probably suffice. Now when you create or (bulk) edit...
The Camel will be down tonight!
We are taking the Camel sites offline to do some routine maintenance and to launch another site update, which should take a few hours. I will post about the site changes when we’re back up.
Update - 2011-02-10 9pm Pacific
This update has been delayed for a day or so. Sorry about the false alarm!
Update - 2011-02-11 7pm Pacific
We will be performing the update tonight.
January 2011
5 posts
Wishlist Importer and Bulk Editing Changes
Some changes just went live today that provide a huge upgrade to the wishlist importer. Namely, you can now choose which price types to create price watches for and at what price they should be tracked. Want to know when the Third Party Used price of any product in your wishlist drops below $5? No problem.
The Bulk Edit page for price watches also got an update today: users can now choose to...
Wishlist importing fixed for non-English speaking...
A bug that was stopping Amazon users from France, Germany, and Japan from importing their wishlists has been fixed. If you’ve recently received a message about being unable to find any ASINs in your wishlist, please try submitting your request again and your wishlist should be imported properly.
Sorry about that! We have to pull the products from your wish list “manually” now...
A great blog post from the UK
Nikki Parker over at Coast Digital recently wrote a nice article about using the Camel. She provides a step-by-step guide to tracking a product, from entering the product’s URL into our search box to creating the price watch.
Read it here!