Archive for the ‘Interesting Uses’ Category

As a child of the 90s, I couldn’t let this bonafide Top Drop go unnoticed.  Fellow camel enthusiasts, I submit to you Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II – The Secret of the Ooze on DVD.

This morning around 1:30am, its price dropped from $9.99 to $5.49; that puts it within $0.50 of its lowest price ever, and since that was way back in November 2008, I think the current price is quite a good value.

Eat a slice of nostalgia pie and snag this movie at Amazon.com.  And if you have Amazon Prime, you’ll be watching it in two days or less and the shipping will be free!

Thanks to the addition of a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, you can now view our Camel price history charts from within the product pages at BestBuy.com! It looks like this, nice eh?

Get the details and install the new Greasemonkey script from its page at camelbuy.com.

UPDATE: All of our Greasemonkey scripts have been replaced by our new Firefox add-on.

In the last month or so, a few people have contacted me asking why, after changing the email address in their Camel account, they were still receiving price drop alerts at the old address.  The answer is pretty simple: because price watches don’t require an email address and/or can be set to alert any email you want, they are not tied to your account’s email address (though that is the default when creating a new price watch).  These people called me to action and now the site will prompt you to let it update your price watches after you change your account’s email address.

I have also been doing a lot of profiling and benchmarking of the site’s performance, trying to fix any painful areas that I discover.  One of these areas was the homepage, which suffered from a rather unoptimized Top Drops category list.  Response times for the uncached homepage are now about 5 times faster than they used to be :]

More to be added here as the weekend continues!  The next thing I want to conquer is the unbearably slow load times in our product browser; it was definitely launched with some room for improvement and now is the TIME.

Sunday changes:

All content (images/javascript/css) for all Camel sites has been moved to Amazon S3.  I am hopeful that this will reduce the number of times when you try to load one of our sites and it lags out waiting for content to download, as Amazon supposedly rocks at delivering the goods.

The password reset password page works again!

Product data updaters for all sites except camelbuy and camelcamelcamel were running sporadically for the past week, that is now resolved and all sites should be updating constantly.

Top Drops on the homepage also got a couple of bug fixes.  First, non-US locales weren’t their having top drops updated.  After I fixed that, a caching bug appeared that made the US locale’s drops show up on every locale; it too should now be resolved.