lots of demands already, haha...
first of all, i recently discovered the 'camel' sites actually via the addon by accident... i absolutely love it, and i'm glad that happened! thank you to the author for such a useful concept! i use it nearly every day and it'll always be in my firefox add-on list for sure.
anyways, i had one small issue tonight... i tried reading the help area, but i cannot tell if this is a bug or if it is just a technical thing, or if it's just me
this is what i was trying to track at camelbuy:
the 'track this product' icon is up on the page (though no price history graph sidebar) but when I click it, i get the message "unable to find the requested product". i tried manually putting the URL into the search box, the SKU, etc.. same result. i will note that i *was* able to add a different product, so i know there's something special or whatever about those links. the only thing I can think that is different is that they are actually on sale right now, and may be some featured item, that somehow may have caused the url to change? just guesses. i also noticed it wasn't in the local DB... here is the link:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Memorex+...=1110264240159
or
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olstempl...questid=129938
same product, just 100 pack and 50 pack of dvd+r's. i find it odd that the URL's are quite different for one. one using a java page, the other using a (perl?) script? either way, i couldn't get it to add the product to the site. just wanted to report that if it was some kind of bug that could be fixed, or if it could give you any insight to any weird practices BB might do to screw your code up.
but aside from that, i am curious as to how products actually get indexed on the camel sites.
my assumption is that when a user manually adds/tracks a product, that product is entered into the local DB, where it begins its tracking history for the charts, etc. so ultimately, it's sort of a community fed system? if so, that would be all the more reason to get more people using it...
great thing, totally.. the only minor bummer is the lack of any history, etc on about half or so of the products i try to view the price graph on, but i'm also realistic and understand the near impossibility to have every product on these sites tracked/have histories. i feel it will improve with time, so i'm not worried about it.
another request would be to just add sites as you can... i think buy.com would be a good one to add, since they often have a lot of deals and sales. i have also heard of meritline.com on a lot of these deal tracker sites (though I cannot vouch for them personally, as i've never ordered from them before). so my request is basically just to keep up the great work, add features and sites as you can, i'd love to see this one progress with new features, sites, preferences, etc. not many other extensions that i actually care to keep up with development, but this is a goodie.
aaand finally, just wanted to re-iterate what i posted/responded to the original request thread about the possibility of doing a superimposed history graph on the product page, so you could immediately see the price patterns and histories of the different sites at once to easily compare. i know you said you were limited by certain factors, but just a neat and helpful idea i think, if it could be done.
you do plan to continue developing this, right? nothing I hate more than a great project go stale and abandoned. the camel must live on... become more powerful... take over the world!