Archive for the ‘Useful Information’ Category

Chad Skelton, the Curious Dad at the Vancouver Sun, wrote a nice review about using the Canadian version of camelcamelcamel to save money at Amazon.ca.  Luckily, for everyone who is unlucky enough to live outside Canada, the tips he provides are applicable to all flavors of the Camel.  Maybe you’ll even be able to replicate his results!  (He saved $20 his first time out.)

Read it here: How a website that tracks price drops on Amazon can save you big money

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.

It’s a new week, and camel friend Jacob stopped by IRC today to inform us of a new product that Amazon is being rude about.  Yes, folks, Amazon is blacklisting the Samsung BD-P1600 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player.  That means we can’t provide any product data until they decide you and I are worthy of such things.

The camels are weeping as I write this but there’s not much we can do, except check back every once in a while.