Happy New Year

Happy New Year. We have been working hard on making TikiWade easier to use and believe that we have done a pretty good job. The searches are much faster now and give back much better search results. You will also notice that we have even more listings from even more sources.

New DB Server up and running

We have our new DB server up and running. You should notice that TikiWade is returning results a lot faster, I know I have. That is all for now.

I Wanna go fast.

Sorry for the slowness of the site over the last week. What caused the slowness was a change in how I collect and store keywords from listings. I am also now indexing the listings descriptions too. This caused the number of keywords that the database had to grow exponentially. It turns out that a little SQL optimization can go a long way in speeding things up.

I also started using a technology that I learned about and played with last year called memcached. It is a server that allows me to store database results in memory for a little while so that the database does not need to be re-searched as you page through the results, only when you perform the initial search.

Thank you everyone for your continued support as we grow TikiWade to be a better way to find and sell classifieds online.

List your stuff before you know you want it listed

In an effort to get more classified listing content on TikiWade we have implemented a new technology that ties in with Google (now known as Topika) maps that will look through the satellite image of your home for various merchandise that you no longer want and list it for you on TikiWade.

This technology uses a complex algorithm to determine what to list based on your past and current usage of the objects as well as matching your personality to the items in your home. It will even list that old China that you keep in boxes in the store room of your basement.

Don't worry though, TikiWade will continue to keep your personal information private by pre-selecting buyers for your stuff based on current trends, age, and a number of other shopper profiling techniques.

Please let un know if you like this service as it is in beta.

Wade

No More Dead Ends

Don't you hate it when you find a listing that you are interested in and after you click on it it says that it has been removed? Well we do to. So we are now constantly going through the thousands of listings that we have and verifying that they are still available, so you don't have to.

Enjoy, and please keep on telling us what you like/don't like, etc...

Thanks and have a great day,
Wade

Big News

The big news is that we have been remodeling and have made some exciting changes.

First, we are now gathering and indexing classified listings from several sources and making them searchable through TikiWade. We are currently just getting the listings from TikiWade, but will soon be getting them from other areas as well. We are only holding on to 5 days worth of listings at the moment.

Secondly, as you will notice, the home page has changed to just a search field. Thats right, you now need to search to find what you are looking for, but I'll share a little secret with in you in this blog post, if you leave the search field blank and just click the "Tiki Search" button you will get back everything.

Thirdly, if the listing on the other site has images in the postings, we will try to grab the first image and use it as a gallery image. Your listings will still look best when they are hosted on TikiWade though, because you have more control.

We will continue to work on improving TikiWade, please continue to check it and give us feedback. Please also tell others about TikiWade. The more people that are using it the more we can improve it.

Thanks

Wade

Selenium RC

I just wanted to post a little blurb about something that selenium rc does that caught me. When you write a suite of tests using the IDE the tests run sequentially in the browser and everything works great. However, when you export each test to java for junit, and then export the suite, and try to run the suite, the tests open a new browser for each test. This can cause the tests to fail if the next test depends on the browse to be in the state that it was left in from the previous test.

The solution was to add -browserSessionReuse to the command line to start the rc server.

IE

It should be looking pretty good for all you IE users now. I also unearthed a few bugs and fixed them while I was at it. Thank goodness for Parallels on my Mac:-)

Nothing stays the same

It's funny, and great, how things are always being updated. Technology is always growing, and as a result forcing us to grow with it. I updated the site to using Dojo 1.4.1. last weekend. I had one minor race condition in the javascript that it 'uncovered' for me. That was a pretty easy fix, but other than that it has been smooth sailing. I do still have some touch-ups to do for IE that I am working on now.

For those who care, I maintain a separate css file that only loads if the browser is IE. The file is named iehacks.css. Anyway, this file is the last css file that gets loaded, so anything I put in it will override any other settings, to allow me to fix problems with the way IE renders pages vs most other browsers.

I also found some memory that was being wasted in the new web crawlers. That should allow me to expand and gather even more listings from more sources. We currently read from over 350 sources and index them all for you. So when you search on TikiWade you are searching them all at once.

I am considering adding a wiki to tikiwade so that I can create more documentation on tikiwade and stuff like this. I think that some will find it useful.

More Stuff

As you might have noticed we have changed the format of the main page some. It is now just a simple search field. We are also now gathering and indexing listings from several other sources, as well as our own, so that you can get more results from TikiWade than you can from going to any one other single source. We will continue to work on improving this format and adding more sources to draw on for results.