Archive for the ‘System Status’ Category

Based on a lot of great user feedback from Tom Metro — this update’s for you, pal — over at the Camel Farm, I have updated our sites with some good changes that should make us all Camelate more heartily.

Instantaneous price watch alerts

One of Tom’s complaints was that our price watch alerts seem to be sent some time after the actual price drop.  As I explained to him, this was leftover from our old, crippled updating system, which benefited from delivering all alerts at once rather than as they occurred; now that we have upgraded our infrastructure and the underlying code quite significantly, there’s little reason not to send our alerts out right when we notice the price change.

So, now, you should get your email, Twitter, and RSS alerts within minutes of the price drop.  If you are trying to get a highly coveted product like The Flaming Lips + Henry Rollins Doing the Dark Side of the Moon, this might give you the edge you need to snag it before someone else does!

Automated price updates

Tom also suggested that users be able to hint/nudge/encourage a product into being updated, since we do run into some lag as we update all of the products in our database.  The solution we landed on works something like this:

When you view a product that hasn’t had its price checked in 8 hours or more, our system queues that product for immediate update.  This means that, aside from the most popular 80-100k products on the site (which receive updates about every 6 hours), now you needn’t wait to see the latest price of any product.  Simply view the product in question and, if the prices are stale enough, we will update it for you.  You don’t even have to wait around for the page to load while we’re updating the product: everything happens in the background so you can continue browsing, or refresh the page after a short amount of time to see if there are any new prices.

How can you tell if you have initiated an update?  You’ll see the following message (though the wording may become less clunkity over time):

And how do you determine when a product was last updated?  This information is held in the table next to the product image (in the Overview tab on Camelcamelcamel) and is labeled “Crawled at”.  This is a timestamp that will change after the update you’ve initiated is complete, like so.

becomes

Merchant / offer linkage

Yet another appreciated suggestion from Tom!  We felt this was a good idea at the time but lately it has become apparent that linking directly to specific merchants or product offers is a bad idea, given that an offer could expire before you click the link.  So, I’ve removed that feature for now.  You’ll have to dig around for the price you want, but this way we avoid the situation of Amazon saying a product is out of stock when it is clearly available.

What did we learn?

To achieve true (Camel-related) enlightenment, one must do as Tom Metro does:  post feature suggestions and bug reports in the places that take them, like our Feedback thing or our registration-optional forum.  Thanks, we appreciate it!

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?

This afternoon, one of our servers had some RAM die and that took down the Camel sites.  The faulty RAM has been pulled and the server is working again, so I have turned our sites back on.  Please let me know if you find anything broken!

(Thanks to our friend Justin who sprang into action and played doctor on our server.)

By the way, here’s the price history chart of the RAM we use and will be replacing.  Notice any problems with the Newegg price here?

It doesn’t get any better at Amazon, either.

Considering we bought at like $175 last time, things are looking rather bleak!