Archive for the ‘Development Log’ Category

Hello once again, brave Camelteers.  Last night I launched some tasty changes that are sure to excite your brain zone.

Big-time chart changes

First of all, I want to apologize for removing the legend on the Camelizer’s charts.  We were working on some other charts and inadvertently changed more than we wanted.  This, however, led us to create a much nicer legend.  A legend that does not cover any section of the chart, and includes data about the min and max prices displayed therein.  The Camelizer charts are also now about 15% taller.  And all of our charts received some updates too, such as ensuring that the Amazon price is drawn on top of the others (and is thus most visible), fixing element spacing issues, and always displaying the year on the X axis.

Love it or hate it, please tell us what you think.  Our goal is to make our charts as useful to you as possible.

Lowest and Highest prices in product pages

That our product pages list only the lowest and highest displayed price has been a user complaint for a while, as it limits this data to the 10 most recent price changes and had a high potential for being misunderstood.  Being the dedicated listener I am, last night I embarked on a journey to remedy this situation, and believe I succeeded.  Yes, you heard that right: the highest and lowest prices displayed on product pages are now determined using all of our data (not just what is displayed on that specific page.)  So now, no matter if a price change happened last week or last year, our product pages will show you the absolute lowest and highest prices we have ever seen.

The rest of the product pages still only show the 10 most recent price changes, though, so don’t expect the single price type charts to contain data outside of that window.

Reliable product lookups

Our Amazon product updating system (which checks products for price changes) also received an update, which allows it to capture data from even the most offer-laden products.  Formerly, we had a limit on the number of “price lookups” we would do on a given product during a given update.   This caused a problem with products that have tons of merchant offers, where our updater would stop searching for pricing data before it had sifted through all of the available offers.  Last night’s update fixes this problem and should mean we’re checking every offer that Amazon provides.

That just about covers the changes in this update.  Camel on!

By the way, here’s a little bit of statistical trivia regarding our product updating system: its current peak average for Amazon is about 18 products updated per second.  Computers, huh?

A network hiccup earlier today left our email server unable to process messages.  I have fixed the problem and our queue of emails is being processed as I write…

I am sorry if you have missed any savings during this time!

After a handful of bug reports regarding our Camelizer extension, I took to the code mines with my cosmic shovel and extracted something more stable.  This update fixes the conflicts our extension was causing with sites like Hulu, and also those using the Lightbox javascript library.

This is one of those updates that everyone should download (particularly if you’ve never tried the Camelizer before.)  Get it here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ghnomdcacenbmilgjigehppbamfndblo

And if you have any problems with any version of the Camelizer, head over to our forum and post in the Camelizer for Chrome support thread.

Update

Recently we found out that the Camelizer is listed as a Featured extension on the Google Chrome extensions website. Here is a screenshot to commemorate the featuredness:

This highlights the importance of user reviews, as being on the Featured list means we get more downloads, and more downloads means we’re able to make our sites better and better. In that spirit, please consider taking a moment to rate/review the Camelizer, no matter which browser you use.

Mozilla Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14392

Google Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ghnomdcacenbmilgjigehppbamfndblo

We appreciate it!