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Category «Techie stuff»

Major downtime lately

UPCZilla has had several instances of major downtime in recent weeks. We know what the problem is (it’s related to DNS servers) and we have implemented certain fixes now which ought to resolve the problem in the medium term. However we will be looking in the longer term for a more robust solution. It seems …

Site fully functional again

We were a bit short-staffed over summer and as a result some server maintenance didn’t get done properly and UPCZilla was struggling to run properly. OK, we’ll just come clean, our server ran out of space, a problem we can normally easily resolve, but with no-one around to monitor these things, the server has been …

MAJOR downtime experienced

Apologies to everyone who couldn’t access UPCZilla.com and our UPC database yesterday. We experienced some major and unexpected downtime – I think the longest period of downtime we have ever had. Actually it was not the site that was down, that was working fine, it was some problem with the DNS servers (we are still …

MASSIVE bug fixed with dead links

SERIOUSLY?! You mean to say that links to about a third of all the retailers we list here, including Wayfair, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Build.com and Zoro, and THOUSANDS OF OTHERS haven’t been working for months, and NOT A SINGLE USER INFORMED US! That’s actually incredible! There was a straight-up error in the code caused …

Bugfix: no empty product titles

Just fixed a long-standing bug that had proved a tough nut to crack for even the hardened coders at UPCZilla. Many sleepless nights were spent… Nah, just kidding, we were just too lazy to look into it, but there was an annoying bug where product titles weren’t showing up for some products. It turned out …

Rich price comparisons working again

We reported last week that some API problems had caused some of our price info providers to break, limiting our price comparison results almost entirely to Amazon and eBay. We don’t like that, our users don’t like that, and Google doesn’t like it either – in fact Google has stated in the past that a …

Limited results currently being displayed

We are currently transitioning some code to new APIs of certain product data providers we use. As a consequence our price comparison listings are not showing product prices from the usual range of retailers, but only from eBay and Amazon. We intend to remedy this as soon as possible as it is important for us …

Faster load times

Today we rolled out a much-needed update intended to incrementally speed up page load times. Users don’t want to wait too long to get the information they want, and Google likes faster pages as well. We implemented an update that was meant to parallelize some tasks when fetching or refreshing product info. This basically means …

Major update to Amazon product data

We have just rolled out what is for us a major update, and pretty relieved we are too to see that everything seems to be working fine. The update should change practically nothing for you, the site user, but it involved some pretty big changes on the back end to do with the way we …