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 much stayed the same. Hopefully that will give OzBargain a fresh image in preparation of up-coming Christmas shopping season.

The unexpected event today.

I have probably only spent my own money on Apple hardware once — it was 2003 and I rode on the hype of MacOS X and bought an iBook G3. However I still remembered playing all the computer games and doing BASIC programming on an Apple ][ back in the 80’s. What this guy did has influenced you and me and whoever is using a computing device today, regardless whether it’s an Apple or not.

Rest in Peace, Mr. SPJ

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 on one of my VPS at Linode‘s POP at Fremont California, with Hurricane Electric as data centre. That specific DC has certainly had quite a few teething issue with “power” recently (how ironic, since they are called hurricane electric), but the latest incident, according to Linode status update, is a massive DDoS that pretty much disables the network connectivity.

Hopefully it wasn’t caused by me. This is now discussed in the forums. While that specific VPS has served me well over the last couple of months, I think it’s time to move on — either to Linode’s other data centres (better stability, trusted brand, higher latency, relatively cheap) or “somewhere else”.

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 your website has become a target for our group. We are going to make full-size DDoS-attack of your resource. Our possibilities and means allow to do this really effective. The result of such attack will look like entire paralyses of your site (absolute inaccessibility from the internet) and it’s total physical destruction.

It’s not difficult to guess how much financial and moral blow you will get after.

But don’t despair! We are ready to forget about your existance forever, if you do one condition:

Transfer 999 PM EUR into our account E1775779 in the payment system Perfect Money :

More details you can get here: https://perfectmoney.com/index.html

We warn you: calling to the police department won’t anyway save your internet resource from distruction!!!

No measures of counteraction will help!!!

You have a choice: to pay us or to loose your site.

Attack wil be started in 3 days after you get this message and will be irreversible until your site is totally out of order. You can save your website if only you pay money.

Sincerely, AnonymousHackersGroup

Not the first time I am threatened with DDoS this year. Actually I received two massive ones back in July (not on OzBargain but my other sites) and that was certainly a traumatising experience. We’ll see — if you see OzBargain disappears tomorrow you know what’s going on.

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 of the day at ~9PM AEST (that has not yet expired)
• Deals that have reached 50 votes

Please Like them and bring all the savings to your friends at Facebook :)

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 just confuse the other members and dilute the discussion. Therefore we have always been encouraging our members to search first before post. However that has been hard to enforce.

Earlier this week we have pushed out some code changes to do full text search on the title field to check whether there exists similar deals from the last 30 days, and prompt the submitters to look them up to avoid duplicates.

Hopefully that will cut down the number of dups and make moderators’ job easier. Thanks to moocher to get that developed.

Via Sydney Morning Herald — Online grocer to nibble on supermarket dominance.

Groceryrun.com.au, an offshoot of CatchoftheDay.com.au, offers up to 200 discounted products from well-known brands and charges a flat shipping fee for deliveries anywhere in Australia. But it comes with a few catches. There will be no perishable items. The products won’t always be the same and might not be available from one week to the next, and nor will customers be able to shop whenever the need arises. The deals will only be able available on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

It’s from the same team, the Leibovich brothers, that brought us Catch of the Day and Scoopon. Currently the website looks like a mess — like those Catch-a-thon events where all the products just get dumped to the front page of the website with no obvious order — way less organised than Deals Direct’s competing site. But then again online discounted grocery is still in its infancy, and we’ll see how everything folds in the near future.

At flat rate of $11 delivery to anywhere in Australia — I’ll need to buy *a lot* of Mars Bar to get the saving back.

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 negged and he was at the point of closing down his Internet presence. The Report goes like this (against his own deal post).

Derogtory and a lie I am in Australia I expect both my threads completely deleted or I am reporting you to ic3 and AFP for illegal cookie stuffing

The problem is — both of his threads have indeed been unpublished so only the moderators and he can see them. So he might be thinking it’s viewable by everyone because he can still see all the negative comments.

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, this blog certainly feels like being neglected. There were many reasons I think, but personal busyness would rank right up there.

I’ve been thinking about “rebooting” this blog for a while, but no, it won’t be the “Bargain Blog” that it used to be. There are way better bargain hunters than I am over there at OzBargain so I won’t embarrass myself posting the crappy deals I found. Instead, this blog would just be about OzBargain — development of it, running it, issues I’ve encountered, occasional amusement, etc. Or maybe a bit more — who knows.

But hopefully I can keep it up. Let’s start with some updates first.

Continue reading »

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 next two months, we will be having a sponsor that is slightly different. No, we are not doing gadgets again, but software this time. Nor is it freebie software that you can just download from the Internet — but something pretty useful for many who have a budget and want a tool to manage his/her own finance. Well, bargain hunting on OzBargain will help you to meet your budget (well, hopefully). This might also help…

Quicken Personal Plus 2010

Quicken Home & Business 2010

Ullash from Quicken came to me last month to negotiate a sponsorship for the next 2 months, and they will be giving OzBargain users who submitted a bargain a chance to win 2 copies of Quicken Personal Plus 2010 subscription edition (RRP $79) each week for the month of March, and 2 copies of Quicken Home & Business 2010 subscription edition (RRP $115) each week for the month of April.

How to win? See the wiki page on OzBargain weekly competitions. Submit a good deal and the personal finance/accounting package could be yours!

Although I spend my day developing software for financial planners, personally I have never used Quicken for planning, budgeting and tax preparation. However I am now very tempted to win the competition myself as the accounting burden from OzBargain has pretty much exceeded my little spreadsheet :) Or maybe I need to see an accountant first…

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 original 1-day-1-sale shop in Australia, which I reviewed at pretty much the beginning of this blog. Quite a few prizes are lining up according to Zazz —

• Laptop warrior kit with carrying case, USB numeric keypad, mouse, USB hub and all that zazz.
• DC to AC inverter with USB charging socket for the car.
• Remote control power switches
• Graphics tablet + styles

Thanks to Scott @ Zazz for organising this. Competition starts this week, and I’ll announce the winners later this afternoon.

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 indeed, but I’ll probably categorise it under “weird product” as I much prefer to hold onto a mouse than hold onto a pen.

Anyway. 9289.com.au is also trying to give away different prizes each week. I shall make the announcement for them when they send me an updated list.

Okay. I was bored. Saw a friend of mine updating her status on Plurk, which is a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter (which OzBargain already has a presence with 1000+ followers). However, all your short messages get presented on a time line together with your friends. “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice to have OzBargain plurking as well”, I thought — I could have updated the status there at the same time Twitter status was updated.

So I started coding. And it is the end result :)

It happens that Plurk actually does not have a public API like Twitter. Therefore to get status updated you have to pretty much posting to the forms. Here is a code snipe in Python on how OzBargain posts to Plurk:

PLURK_USERNAME = 'your Plurk username'
PLURK_PASSWORD = 'your Plurk password'
PLURK_USERID = 'your Plurk user ID'

def plurk(msg, qualifier='says'):
    import cookielib, time, urllib, urllib2

    cookiejar = cookielib.CookieJar()
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(
        cookiejar))
    opener.open('http://www.plurk.com/Users/login',
        urllib.urlencode({
            'nick_name': PLURK_USERNAME,
            'password': PLURK_PASSWORD,
        }))
    opener.open('http://www.plurk.com/TimeLine/addPlurk',
        urllib.urlencode({
            'posted': time.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S', time.gmtime()),
            'qualifier': qualifier,
            'content': msg,
            'lang': 'en',
            'no_comments': '0',
            'uid': PLURK_USERID,
        }))

Note that “USERID” is a numeric value that you can find when you look at the HTML source of your Plurk page. OzBargain is 4759873 for example.

Now, follow OzBargain, if you are a Plurk user!

Man, I love statistics and indices. The monthly Top 100 Aussie Tech Startups is something that I check every now and then just to see “how everyone else is doing”. TechNation used to use various traffic stats (Alexa and Compete ranks), but now have changed to use YouNoodle Scores. What score?!

A YouNoodle Score is a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 0 to 100, of a startup’s impact and importance based on its traction, activity, and buzz. The score is based on information pulled in from thousands of online sources: traffic, mainstream media, the blogosphere, conversations on Twitter, and other key factors.

So instead of just the traffic, it also includes how much media coverage this website receives. Now, stop reading and blog and tweet about OzBargain so hopefully the score will go up :)