Got up this morning seeing that OzBargain was DOWN, returning 502 Gateway Error message — usually when the backend PHP FastCGI processes were borked. According to the bandwidth graph the site dropped dead at around 1AM this morning: Went in to restart the PHP processes (where kill -9 was required). That brought the site up [...]

Received a “fan” mail today. Hello I purchased earings for my wife for Christmas following a “bargain” on your website for Cudo.com.au The fact is after 1 month, the item is still not received. Apparently I am not the only customer to whom that happened, a few other people are in the same situation. So [...]

Almost 4 years ago I blogged about OzBargain’s RSS statistics. The conclusion? Email is king. 4 years later email still rules, despite the wealth of options people get notified these days (Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, etc). OzBargain daily newsletter has been powered by Google’s FeedBurner since pretty much the beginning. However there were some issues: [...]

Google+ pages for business was introduced yesterday, and now OzBargain is on Google+ :) It is still not as flexible and useful as our Facebook page yet. Moreover Google+ has been pretty vacuum currently — great place to post something guaranteeing no one is going to see it. But anyway, I am a Google fanboi [...]

OzBargain has been on its previous theme for almost 4 years. There has always been some minor alternations here and there, but nothing major. We did however, introduced some revamp last week with a new logo image: I won’t call it a completely new themes though — anything between the header and the footer pretty [...]

Got an SMS message this morning (sent from my monit instance to my email to SMS gateway at SMS Global, thanks to previous free SMS deals), saying that the OzBargain server hosting the deal-thumbnail images and internal “foxshot” system is DOWN! Currently OzBargain does around 600GB/month of traffic from those thumbnail images, and is hosted [...]

Received an email from some Russian guys this morning: Your website attacked! Attention! That`s not a joke!!! Your website is threatened by serious danger!!! This letter is intended only for superadministrators or owners of the website!!! Hello, dear administrators or owners of the website http://www.ozbargain.com.au This is AnonymousHackersGroup who speaks to you. It happened that [...]

Saw it this morning It has indeed took a while, and 4,000 is actually quite a small number, comparing to ~65k-70k unique visitors on OzBargain each day. The Facebook page has been staggering for a while and only recently we have automated the posting there. For now OzBargain will post on Facebook Top/most voted deal [...]

Duplicates have always been a problem on OzBargain. When a hot deal hits your inbox, it’s hard to resist the urge of posting that to OzBargain to share that with your fellow bargain hunters in Australia (and get voted up in the process). However having multiple entries of the same offer, i.e. dups, would usually [...]

Well. Running OzBargain I am getting threats all the time. Quite a few threatened to sue and one death threat — but I am trying to avoid them as much as I possibly can. Anyway, got a new threat today in the form of a Report — one disgruntled merchant didn’t like his “deals” getting [...]

Last blog entry: May 2010 — that feels like a long time ago. OzBargain, currently one of the top Australian online communities for shoppers and bargain hunters, started from this humble blog almost 5 years ago, after I’ve been blogging on and off the bargains I found. While the community at OzBargain continues to grow, [...]

Found this page on Wikipedia last week. Thanks to “Eno1″ on Wikipedia for creating the page!

First of all, let me have this chance to thank Zazz, especially Adam and Scott there for helping to run last two months’ competitions smoothly. For the very first time our winners can actually pick the prize, and there’s great communication to help all parties to be in the loop. Well done Zazz! For the [...]

New Year, and New Sponsors for our Weekly Competitions. First of all, big thanks to 9289.com.au for the last 2 months — especially to Jennica and Nancy as they are very helpful getting all the prizes sorted out. And the sponsor for the next two months (January-February 2010) are… Zazz.com.au Zazz.com.au is pretty much the [...]

As announced on OzBargain forum, the weekly competition sponsor for the next two months (November and December 2009) will be 9289.com.au. For the first week, 9289.com.au will be giving away 2x “Elecom Scope Node 3-Button Laser Mouse”, where you can hold onto a mouse like how you normally hold onto a pen. An interesting gadget [...]