Archive for the ‘Site News’ 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?

Today we found a Camelizer review by Umar Anjum of TechCityInc, in which he called our Google Chrome extension “the online shopper’s dream tool”.  We like it!

Read the full article here: http://techcityinc.com/2010/02/25/how-to-track-product-prices-of-multiple-online-shopping-stores/

During the last two nights, I performed maintenance on our database server.  Both times this took longer than anticipated, but I think now we are back in the butter zone.  Maybe the site will even be noticeably faster!  Wouldn’t that be something?

By the way – to accomodate the work I was doing, I had to delete some old user sessions.  The result of this is that anyone who hasn’t visited the site since Feb 1, 2010 will be forced to login again.  (So, not a big deal.)