Posts Tagged buylater
How I Built a Free Grid Computer, In Less Than a Week
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 11Apr08
By now you’ve all heard about BuyLater, my happy little firefox extension that (thanks to an unexpected LifeHacker.com article) is rapidly climbing towards 1000 users and world domination. Without getting TOO technical, I thought I would share with you how I saved BuyLater from becoming an infrastructure nightmare – one that would have either killed the value of the application (real-time updates), or sucked tons of money and hardware into a technology backwash.
This will be a little controversial, I think – simply because the technique I used, (grid computing), is most often used for less… legitimate… purposes. So much so, that it is almost synonymous with “Bot Nets”.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
Screencast of the BuyLater Service (Beta Product, Alpha Video)
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 08Apr08
Middle-of-the-night hacking on live server == BAD
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 08Apr08
For those of you trying out my price-watching service, BuyLater, and especially for those of you using the SMS-messaging feature of twitter – I’m very sorry.
I’ve been trying to get this new feature online over the past two days – let users elect to watch just Amazon-supplied price changes, rather than all vendors. This is handy because, when combined with free shipping, Amazon is often cheaper overall – even when they have a higher price.
So I thought I had it working, by about 1 am last night. Pushed it into production, and let it rip.
Ooops.
Every. Single. Item. In the database. Began sending announcements of “Initial Price: $X” to every user.
I caught it, of course – after about 60 seconds. Which was enough time to send announcements for the first 600 items or so.
If you got one in an email, you can probably safely discard it. If your cell phone woke you up in the middle of the night with a text message (yes, I’ve already got a few bug reports about that) – what can I say? I promise I won’t do it again.
BuyLater 0.7 Released, Support for Canada and UK Users
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 03Apr08
After the deluge of new users from last week’s Lifehacker.com article, followed by a full day on the front page of delicious, I ended up with an inbox full of bug reports. While there were a few pernicious actual “bugs” in there (sorry to everyone who ended up with the ‘can’t delete items’ bug, that’s fixed too), most of them fell into two buckets:
Life after LifeHacker.com – What to do when your Alpha leaks
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 29Mar08
Wow. It’s not every day that, suddenly and without warning, thousands upon thousands of strangers descend upon your happy little world, and start playing with it. But such is the power of LifeHacker.com.
They decided to run a story on my happy little bot this morning. I didn’t know about it, came back from lunch – and I had 100 users. (For the last week, that number has been stubbornly stuck at 8).
I poked a little further, and realized that only 20 of those 100 users had twitter accounts. Hmm – I guess I better get email notifications working, eh?
I Wrote A MashUp, Just for You
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 22Mar08
If you’re one of those people who stood in “The Line”, then this isn’t for you.
If you get a strange, visceral pleasure in wasting hours, even days, of your life, waiting for your local WalMart to get more Beanie Babies in stock – then you should stop reading right now.
If you like to revisit your local grocery store every night, just to see if they’ve dropped the price on those great donuts in aisle 4… then hit the Back Button, and read something else.
But – if you have a life, and you still want to try and buy something online – I might have something that can help.
It’s called BuyLater, and that’s exactly what it’s for – buying Amazon products, later on.
Later can be: When it’s back “In Stock” (can someone say Wii?), or simply when it’s a little cheaper (or even on sale).
Unlike many of my ideas (which are unique, innovative, and incomprehensible), this one actually isn’t mine. My buddy Jesse Andrews did it first, with a Wii-only bot called WiiMe. I just took the idea, and strreeettched it a little.
