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December 1999
(Some links may have expired from this archived News Letter)
Number Two
Greetings!
Time for another News Letter to Camprice.com subscribers. This is the last one before the new year, and contains some important announcements December 6th, 1999, www.camprice.com will be off the air for a few hours.... pair.com, the hosting service for www.camprice.com is changing physical location on the 6th of December. All pair.com services wilkl be suspended while the servers are physically moved to a new, larger location. We have been very happy with pair.com hosting, and hope that camoprice.com subscribers can live with the limited down time while they get their act together in new quarters. Pair estimates that we will be out of business for abaout 5 hours maximum. Clickhere for exact information about the time of interrupted service. This page also shows some nice pictures of what a server really looks like. We all use the internet, but how many of us have ever actually been inside a service provider's sanctum sanctorum ? We don't expect any problems as far as data corruption is concerned. Camprice.com is backed-up at pair.com in addition to being fully backed-up here in Hong Kong on off line machines. If there are changes to this schedule we will send a "Flash" message to all camprice.com subscribers. Since the last News Letter the Webteam (mailto:webteam@camprice.com) has been busy making my life easier, and building features into camprice.com that we only imagined at the beginning. The latest and perhaps most significant is the Aution listing feature. Now camprice.com subscribers have the option of placing a hot link into the description of any auction they are running on eBay, Amazom or Yahoo which will take viewers to a live camprice search result for the camera they are selling. All you have to do is click on the highlighted item number in your search result and copy and paste the resulting html into your Auction description. It couldn't be simpler.
The html looks something like this:
Get price reference on camprice.com
You can replace the "Get price reference on camprice.com" linked text with whatever you feel appropriate.
I've made an eBay auction at:
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=212988282 Go there and see for yourself how the link works.
Try doing that with a book based guide!
There is another benchmark approaching. I'm within 4 listings of breaking the magic 23,500 mark. As a matter of fact, if I weren't working on this News Letter, I'd probably have made it by now.
Once all the accessories are added, camprice.com will be over 27,000 prices strong.
Try doing that with a book based guide!
I've now added 1191 pictures to the database. You can get an idea of what's there simply by going to thehttp://www.camprice.com Home Page and taking a look in the bupper left hand corner. The pictures in the database are rotated randomly every few minutes. Cameras which are linked to search results are viewable simply by clicking on the "click here" link under the photo. There are 1242 cameras linked to pictures already. The reason that there are more camera links than pictures is that one picture can serve for more than one camera. For example, if there are Chrome and Black versions of the same camera listed, I'll use the Chrome camera picture for the Black version until I have a picture of the Black camera. A note is always made in the description when a picture does not agree exactly with the camera listing. Try doing that with a Book based guide! You may notice some pictures of accessories and lenses when you visit the home page. Along with camera pictures, these are placed into the system as I receive them in preparation for the accessory/lens searches when that database is ready. Speaking of which, I have not found time to complete the processing of the accessory and lens listings. Now with the holidays, I doubt whether I'll have time before the middle of January to get the job done.
Here are few interesting numbers from that database.
I've updated 3871 camera listings since the 1st of September, 1999.
Try doing that with a book based guide!
The first segment of the eBay archive project is finished. The results from over 200,000 (203574 to be exact...) completed auctions have been downloaded, and placed into a File Maker Pro database. It is my intention to make this raw data searchable by subscribers at some point in the not too distant future.
Before I do this however, I'd like to know what you think about the idea. Would you use it? Does it sound loke a useful tool? Since the File Maker Pro indexed database is over 350 MB, this is no small project.
At last count there were camprice.com subscribers in: USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Holland, UK, Finland, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa, India and Japan.
The home pages of www.camprice.com now have a new look. These changes based on suggestions made by Yahoo.com and should give www.camprice.com high placement in their search engine.
While logging and linking the photographs I took at Holger Schult's house in Melbourne, Australia, I ran into a problem. At some point my databack on the Contax RTS II went dead. From that time on, I was unable to make tape recorded notes of the cameras I was photographing. I could still ID many cameras from the resluting pictures, but sosmetimes I needed a relevant detail, and I was not able to see it in the photo. In order for Holger to help me fill in the blanks, the Webteam made a form opage for Holger to use when responding to my queries. You can take a look at this page and form by visiting Holger's Mystery Cameras. and clicking on any of the links. If you like, you can even use the form to list a cameraa that you have but that is NOT in the camprice.com database.
Soon there will be a page just for adding camera data and even sending photographs for inclusion into the database.
Try doing that with a book based guide!
Bug fix ------- A bug in the search engine that caused problems in displaying the "next 5 entries" button has now been fixed. Many thanks to subscribers Mordechai Saxon, Lew Steinfeld and Louis Calvert for helping us identify the problem.
Please report bugs/problems to support@camprice.com
- Arthur
The market for fake NAZI Leicas may be about to fall through the floor. Go to: Auction Watch News Report
That's about it for this edition of the Camprice.com News Letter. I'll go back to plugging away at the pictures, and verifying prices and generally tweaking the database.
sincerely,
Douglas St.Denny
Discovery Bay, Lantau Island
Hong Kong
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