Thanks to “Eno1″ on Wikipedia for creating the page!

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…

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.

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.