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.

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!

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 :)

My last post was about ShoppingSquare sponsoring OzBargain in our weekly competitions. Over the last thirteen weeks ShoppingSquare has been giving out 2x 8GB USB Drive each week. Big thanks to Danilo and team at ShoppingSquare.

Upcoming Sponsor

But we have a slight change of sponsor this week. TopBuy.com.au, another Sydney-based online retailer, will be providing us the prizes for the next two months (September to October 2009). And the prize? Digital Photo Frame with 1.5 Inch LCD that is sold on TopBuy.com.au for $29.95. Again — two winners each week, one with most votes and the other one randomly picked. Big thanks to Max at TopBuy.

How do I Sponsor OzBargain’s Weekly Competition?

This is actually one of the frequently asked questions. After all, let’s face it — while we do thank the sponsors for their generosity, they do get something out of the sponsorship. First of all their name and website gets mentioned here on this blog. Moreover, sponsors are featured on the sidebar of OzBargain, with their logo and a direct link to their website for the duration of their sponsorship. They are visible on almost all page views — and we are talking about 2.9 million page views there from August 2009.

With overwhelming requests from various merchants trying to tap into “cheap advertising”, I decided to add a section on OzBargain wiki on how to sponsor our weekly competition.

First of all, it would be a queue on the first come and first serve basis. As you can see the November-December spot has already been occupied by 9289.com.au (they have given me a few options and I have not yet decided). Feel free to contact me with your choice of prize, and I will pick the best offers and add them onto the queue. Next available spot is January next year.

Here’s some spec (copied from ShoppingSquare’s website):

DataTraveler 100 was built with simplicity in mind, allowing you to focus on your data. The USB connector is safely housed inside the sleek case, so you don.t have to worry about losing a cap. DataTraveler 100 is available in capacities up to 8GB to give you plenty of room to hold just about any document, from term papers and theses to digital images, spreadsheets or other important documents.

• Dimensions: 2.35″ x 0.88″ x 0.37″ (59.7mm x 22.3mm x 9.5mm)
• Capacities: 8GB
• Operating Temperatures: 32F to 140F (0C to 60C)
• Storage Temperatures: -4F to 185F (-20C to 85C)
• Weight: 0.48 oz (12g)

Valued at $24.70 on ShoppingSquare’s website (+free delivery that’s worth $9.99).

What you need to do is also having a registered account at ShoppingSquare so the crew at ShoppingSquare can post the item to the winners.

Again, big thanks to our sponsor — and don’t forget to submit your offers to win our weekly prize!

Because Swoopo is, at its heart, thinly veiled gambling. The companies backing Swoopo and other Penny Auction sites are hoping unsophisticated regulatory agencies will buy the “It’s not a game of chance” argument if it’s wrapped in a lot of technical intarweb mumbo-jumbo they can’t fully comprehend.

Reminds me of many unique bid auction sites that surfaced online 2 years ago, where some of them have actually been covered here on the OzBargain blog. I actually went to the Swoopo site and it does feel like gambling — and it’s addictive. I can just sit there and watch the clock counts down to 0, or bounds back to 15 second again with more bidding action.

It’s actually worse than gambling because not only you need to pay for entrance, win the auction purely by chance (and risk loosing your money not winning the auction), addictive in nature which you ended up spending more than you should because you don’t want to lose out — you still need to pay for than damn thing when you win.

But somehow it has gained a lot of popularity according to Alexa. I guess the old saying is right. Every second on Swoopo, “a fool and his money is soon parted”.

On the 27th of May we’ll be running a little members only promotion. We’ll be selling a lot of stuff that people love and want, at prices they could only dream about.

• This is a members only special event. Not a member? Click here to register. Its important to register in advance, as registration will be closing at 11am on the day, one hour before the event goes live.
• Its all happening to get people talking about CatchOfTheDay
• Quantities are very limited, and listed below
• We can’t predict how big the response will be, have mercy on our servers

We definitely fell on point 2 there by talking about it on this blog and this post on OzBargain. Although many still felt hurt from last year’s birthday bash fiasco (more details on the OzBargain wiki), it certainly did not stop them trying to run it again this year.

Well. At least they are trying to be honest this time and admit that there’s still possibily that their web servers cannot cope with load. They have also clearly listed out the quantity this time to avoid speculations like last time on exactly how many Nintendo Wii’s they have in their warehouse.

I had a quick glance on the items listed and unfortunately nothing interests me this time so I won’t queue up with you guys :)

Update: Just had a look at Rackspace’s managed configuration (I believe CoTD uses Rackspace for hosting), and the “cheapest” server has a quad core AMD, 2GB memory and runs RedHat Linux — at the price that’s around 10x our monthly hosting cost here at OzBargain (i.e. expensive).

Here are some simple suggestions for handing traffic surge (might not be possible as Rackspace is managing the system):

• Replace Apache/mod_php with Nginx/PHP-FastCGI (running 2 Nginx worker + ~10 PHP slaves) and enable xcache for op-code and variable caching.
• Replace your front page with a static HTML file which Nginx will serve in no time. Just re-generate it every few minutes for updates.
• Cache all the pages in xcache (using variable cache), and serve them to guests/visitors.

Even a quad core AMD Opteron will go a long way :)