A Camel Thing

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 information tied to a group of price watches, rather than changing them one at a time.

Product search

Formerly, by default, the search box at the top of every page on our site would take you to search results as provided by Amazon’s (or Best Buy’s) product data API.  While this provides the most recent / up-to-date results directly from the retailer, it has the tendency to use up the limited (by the retailer) number of API requests we can make. So, to alleviate this problem, we’ve changed the search box to point at our own product browser.  This means that you will receive search results much quicker than you normally would, since we don’t have to contact the retailer and ask for search results, and our API requests can be saved for product pricing updates. You can still access the API-based search if you can’t find what you want.  Just click the link above the search results in our product browser and your search will be executed via the retailer’s API instead.

Homepage changes

I wanted to make the homepage load faster, so I’ve implemented a couple of changes that should help.  First, the country flags that appear on the homepage and in the header of the site now use Internet Magic to store all of the flags (both large and small) in one image file; this means your browser has to download about 9 fewer images than it normally would have, a substantial savings since each request for a new image or other file adds overhead and makes the site load more slowly.  The other related optimization I made is that the price history charts in the top drops section of the homepage now load after the page is loaded.  That equates to 5 fewer images that have to load before the page is considered loaded. You may have noticed that the features scroller was looking pretty sad in Internet Explorer…the text was fuzzy / jagged.  This has been fixed!  As has the bug involving the search box width as reported here by Tom Metro.

What’s next?!

The Camelizer needs upgrading to work with Firefox 4.  Product search needs to better combine API results with those from our database.  The “products at the lowest price ever” page needs to get launched. Plenty of things to look forward to!