Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

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!

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.

Cosmic Shovel HQ is moving a few blocks deeper into Oakland this month, and Wednesday, July 29th is when the Camel farm moves.  This will occur during the evening hours and shouldn’t require more than an hour or two worth of downtime.  If you try to access any of the Camel sites while we’re down, you’ll end up seeing something like this.

Thank you for your patience while we attempt to get everything settled at our new place.

P.S. – During the move, you might try to fill your time playing some games on WIFIGHT!, a great (free) gaming network for Palm phones and Windows computers created by my friend (and the first person EVER to  purchase a tracked product) Brennan.

Update – We were down for a couple of hours but all things should now be back to normal.  A success move!