A Camel Thing

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.

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 hours, and I will do my best to fix these problems when I wake up!

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!

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; otherwise, we will still be able to get the Third Party New price, and used prices aren’t affected in either scenario.  There is no published way to work around this, so it appears that we are stuck with this new API.  Fortunately, most of our users probably won’t care about third party merchants when Amazon is selling for less, but we don’t like having holes in our data!

Bringing our code up-to-date with these API changes also means that we are now able to offer support for Amazons China, Italy, and Spain.  Welcome to all of the new users who join us in those locales!

Top Drops Improvements

Due to the rapid fluctuation of prices at Amazon, our Top Drops list used to have the tendency to display products that weren’t actually worth looking at; the prices were still high, or they had jumped up and then right back down to the same price (or higher!)

These problems should now be a thing of the past.  We’ve tightened the requirements for being displays in the Top Drops by addressing the aforementioned problems of bad prices and “fake” deals.  We’re still tweaking the code as new products are updated and enter the list, but the list is already looking much more useful!

Ongoing Site Redesign

In parallel with those changes, we have been working on converting more of the site’s pages to our new style.  In this update, the product browser’s default screen and the last page of the user registration process have had the new style applied.

We also fixed a bug in the wishlist management code that was causing some page requests to fail.

That’s it for now.  Thanks to everyone who voted in our poll, you all had a lot of useful feedback!

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!

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 time.

Sorry for any inconvenience or missed deals this may cause.

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 previous blog post.

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 existing versions of their API (data source), and that means we’ve had to take some measures to protect our database from this “lesser” data while we figure out how to deal with it.

So, for now — and we really hope this is temporary — Amazon Germany and Amazon Japan support have been disabled.  You can still view our existing data, but no new data will be consumed until we find a workaround.  All other Amazon locales will continue working normally, with one caveat: due to heightened traffic, no new products will be added to our database until we can expand our updating capacity.

We are working with Amazon to resolve all of these issues, but it might take some time before we are back to running at full steam.  We are sincerely sorry that this happened, but that’s how it goes when you rely on another company for data: you take what you can get and roll with the punches.  And, due to our immense respect for Amazon, we want to avoid screen scraping if at all possible, so using their API is the only way for us to acquire product data.

Thanks for understanding.

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.  We can change, honest!

Update

Our ISP has just confirmed that the email server problem was caused by one of their employees.  ”Oops”.