Buxr deals on WiredDeals
It's been almost 2 years since I posted on this blog. Time flies! :-) Some of you might know that WiredDeals is not my only project. Buxr is a relatively new social bargain hunting site which I have been busy with lately. The main difference between Buxr and sites like SlickDeals or Fatwallet is that the shopping deals are much better structured and are easier to find. The main similarity is the spirit of the community.
So far I have been happy the way things turn out for Buxr. The community grows and I keep adding features to the website. Over the past months the quality and amount of deals posted on Buxr has prompted me to consider syndicating it into WiredDeals. These deals are often very different from what you will typically find on WiredDeals and so I figured it would be mutually beneficial to add them as a feed
The integration is mostly complete at this point and I don't expect any major issues, however if you do see a bug, do not hesitate to let me know!
Price comparison widget added
In your bargain hunting, as you look at a particular shopping deal, wouldn't it be useful sometimes to see if other merchants offer the same item and if they do, what the price is? We thought it was VERY USEFUL and this is why we added this functionality to WiredDeals.
Starting today, when you open deals in a preview page (where you only see the first forum post) you will notice that some of them will have a table at the bottom after the post content. The table will show a similar (or the same) product with prices from several competing merchants. Clicking on those links will bring you directly to the merchant page for the offered product.
While we are doing out best to find the matching offers, sometimes you will still find a product in that table that is not very relevant to the shopping deal you are looking at. No need to worry (and email us about each mismatch). We constantly keep working on improving this feature and we hope the results will get much better over time.
Love it? Hate it? Please let us know. We will be glad to hear from you!
FatWallet related bug fixed
Hello everyone! It has been a while since we made an update. No, we didn't forget about you guys.
We have been working hard to maintain and improve WiredDeals and have been answering all the questions you send to us. In fact just today we received an email from Ken who helped us discover a bug in WiredDeals backend. The bug is related to how we interpret FatWallet deals rating. It appears that FatWallet has recently changed the format of RSS feeds which broke some of our logic.
This bug should be fixed by now. As a result you will start seeing more deals from FatWallet showing up on the New Deals and Hot Deals tabs.
Please let us know if you have any questions or find any other problems with the service. Your feedback helps us make WiredDeals a better place!
Short service update
This is a short update to let you know what is going on at WiredDeals. You might remember that we recently introduced Premium Accounts. We were hoping you would be interested in the extra functionality however that has turned out not to be the case. Only one person has signed up so far.
You might know that WiredDeals is fully self financed and someone has to pay for support and web hosting. As the result, we have to reintroduce the advertisements. This time however we decided to make them less intrusive. The ads will be on the right side clearly separated from the main content.
Important! If you notice advertisements labeled as FatWallet or SlickDeals and linking to a site other than these two, please let us know as soon as possible so we can filter out those.
Almost forgot, please check out the navigational links to the left (that we just added) and let us know if you find them useful.
WiredDeals discussed at FatWallet forums
Someone has started a thread about WiredDeals at the FatWallet forums. It is up for 2 days now and has collected some interesting replies. Check it out over here and add your own opinion if you think FatWallet community needs to hear it.
The fact that the discussion hasn't been taken down may mean two things (a) all moderators are already celebrating the holidays (b) folks at FatWallet are busy writing C & D letters and don't want to get distracted on little things like this forum discussion.
Seriously though this if anything may mean silent acceptance of WiredDeals by FatWallet management (see my earlier post about the letter we received from Tim Storm). I hold my fingers crossed and hope for official comments to follow.
Introducing Premium Accounts
If you find yourself using WiredDeals every day please consider contributing to the project by upgrading to Premium Account. Your support will allow us to keep the basic service free for the rest of the users. It will also allow you to get more from WiredDeals. Here are highlights of the differences between Free and Premium Account.
| Free Account | Premium Account | |
|---|---|---|
| Maxium Number of Alerts | 3 | 15 |
| Alerts Processing Frequency | Every 30 minutes | Every 15 minutes |
If you are already a registered WiredDeals user then go to Premium Accounts for an upgrade. We will process your request within 1-2 business days of your payment. After that you have 10 days to try the service. If you are not satisfied you can request a full refund before your trial period is over.
Attention! We are currently running a year end promotion. If you sign up before the end of 2006 you will receive 1 year Premium Account for the price of 6 months! Just use the 6 months option when you pay and we will upgrade your account for 1 year.We Added New Chart
We have added a new chart that shows how new deals collected by WiredDeals are distributed between FatWallet and SlickDeals. Here is an interesting observation looking at the new chart and the old one: the charts seem to conflict each other, one shows that FatWallet has more deals while the other shows otherwise. The discrepancy has a simple explanation. SlickDeals supply more new deals every day but from these deals there is lesser amount (compared to FatWallet) that stays active (if a corresponding discussion thread is stale for longer than 24 hours the deal is removed from the database). You can look at it this way: SlickDeals forums produce many low quality posts that get forgotten very soon.
Another minor change. The Hot Deals page now shows deals from the last day by default (used to be 7 days). The same change applies to Hot Deals front page section. It looks like 1 day makes more sense since we try to make the web site more convenience for our regular users - those that return to check on the deals every day. More occasional visitors can still change the time using the drop-down list in the upper right corner of Hot Deals page.
Update on my email from Tim Storm. I have not heard from him ever since which may be a good thing. I would hate to see him shut off the RSS feed. I will keep you updated if there are any news
No More Annoying Advertisements
Last Friday I received an email from Tim Storm, the owner of FatWallet, where he among other things expresses concern about the advertisements placed on WiredDeals pages. In particular one of the Google Ads had FatWallet name in it and linked to another web site, not FatWallet. While I do not control the advertisements placed on our pages by Google I have the ability to filter out certain ones - which I promptly suggested to do in my reply to Tim.
After giving it some more thought I decided that I will remove all contextual Google Ads from the web site. WiredDeals has never been about getting rich. If anything it is a way for me to implement our vision of a better user experience for those struggling to find gems in the huge amount of information FatWallet and SlickDeals forums provide. I hope Tim and SlickDeals owners share this vision with me and will allow WiredDeals to exist for all of us to benefit.
If you have an opinion on the subject and would like to share it with us and everyone else please do so in the comments section to this post.
Improve your bargain hunting
Make your bargain hunting more effective (and organize yourself as well) with this new feature that we just launched. Interests in essence are keywords that will get highlighted as you browse deals. They work very similar to the search except you don't need to actually search - the search is always going in the background as you browse the deals. Add your interests one per line at this page and see how it works. Try not to add too short keywords that will produce a lot of useless highlights. Searching for the keyword before adding it will give you an idea if the keyword is a good candidate or not (use Search Entire Phrase option).
Uncertain what your interests are? Let us guess them for you based on the deals you save. Just enable Autogenerate and we will do our best to compile the list of keywords for you. If you do so you can then fine-tune the list of generated keywords by excluding some. Just add the undesired keywords to the Exclude list one per line and they will not be highlighted.
Saving deals just became easier
You asked it - you got it! Saving deals just became easier. Try clicking on this icon: 
next to the link to the deal to check out the new options. Once you save the deal the icon will change to 
so whenever you encounter it again you will be able to distinguish it as saved.
In addition we also added Share it with Friends option that simply sends the deal details to an email of your choice. Saves you time on cutting and pasting that link. ;-)
A usual disclaimer: let us know if you like it or not. Your comments drive improvements to this web site. Keep them coming!
Displaying the First Forum Posting
You might have noticed that now when you click on a link to the deal you will see the content of the first (AKA original) posting in an embedded window. This should save you time on opening a new browser window and loading the forum thread to your PC. If you want to you can still go it the old way by clicking read more... in the lower right corner of the embedded window or by clicking 
to the right of each link to a deal. In fact you will have to do so if you want to read the entire deal discussion at the forum.
Give this new functionality a try and let us know if you like it.
A special note for the folks at SlickDeals and FatWallet. All links in the thread posting are preserved as is. Not content tweaking of any sort is done or is planned to be done. We are doing the best we can to improve the experience for the users and yet to preserve the original content posted by users to the forums. And finally, we are open to any of your comments regarding how we use the forums content.