Blocking Stores and Users on Deal Listing Pages

scotty on 22/06/2012 at 12:01 pm, filed under OzBargain

It is one of many small handy features that got implemented on OzBargain unannounced, except this request got marked as “Resolved”. Do you know that you can customise your OzBargain Front Page and New Deals Page by hiding stores and users that you are not particularly fond of? Rather than complaining, “hey I am an […]

Samsung Galaxy S III Deals on OzBargain

scotty on 31/05/2012 at 1:59 pm, filed under OzBargain

Yes, it is here. Samsung Galaxy S III, one of the most highly anticipated phone launch so far this year, has arrived in Australia this morning. As usual, keen OzBargains have already been discussing SGS3’s release since early this month, and the best way to track best deals on Samsung Galaxy S III is keeping […]

Diablo III Deals on OzBargain

scotty on 16/05/2012 at 12:33 pm, filed under OzBargain

If OzBargain has been quiet over the last 2 days — I am not surprised. I wasn’t really into video games since the original Team Fortress days fragging your university buddies on 33.6kbps modem, but just by observing the top gaming related deals on OzBargain I can tell that Diablo III is the hottest thing […]

Bookmark Deals to Folders

scotty on 09/05/2012 at 12:37 pm, filed under OzBargain

Earlier on Monday I pushed out a new feature that I’ve been working over last week — Add to Folders. For 2 days only 12 folders have been created on the system, 4 of them are actually testing/demo folders created by the moderators (despite attempts to promote it on Facebook and on Google+). So let’s […]

Status Down: 8 February 2012

scotty on 08/02/2012 at 7:56 am, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

OzBargain Responsible for Merchant’s Failure to Deliver?

scotty on 09/01/2012 at 9:32 pm, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

OzBargain Newsletter – Have You Subscribed?

scotty on 09/11/2011 at 12:12 pm, filed under OzBargain

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: […]

OzBargain Now on Google+

scotty on 09/11/2011 at 10:05 am, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

New Logo, New Themes

scotty on 31/10/2011 at 11:15 am, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

Linode Fremont Offline – Hunting for New Server Now

scotty on 04/10/2011 at 10:37 am, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

Threat of the Day – DDoS This Time

scotty on 29/09/2011 at 7:20 pm, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

4,000

scotty on 27/09/2011 at 12:13 pm, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

Duplicate Checking on the Title of Submission

scotty on 22/09/2011 at 12:13 pm, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

Threat of the Day

scotty on 20/09/2011 at 6:08 pm, filed under OzBargain

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 […]

Rebooting The Blog + Some Updates

scotty on 19/09/2011 at 9:30 pm, filed under OzBargain

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, […]