A small bug caused the update utility to malfunction, meaning TypoTrawler hasn’t been updated over the last few days. This has now been fixed and I’ve forced an update of the database, so service should be back to normal in about an hour, once it’s finished.

 I rushed out a small update yesterday, linking the ‘Custom Search’ button to our sister site, TypoTracker. The only problem was that I made a typo! In the HTML code, I entered ‘</scpan>’ instead of ‘</span>’. This went unnotice, as the page was rendered perfectly in Firefox (the browser I was using to develop in), but Internet Explorer choked on the mistake and the page ended up displaying a load of text across the top. It was such a small change that I didn’t bother testing it in other browsers… so it was a full day later that we realized something was wrong, when one of us accessed the page with IE. I’ve since learn’t my lesson.

As such, the latest update has been thoroughly tested by myself, using multiple browsers. It’s again to do with the ‘Custom Search’ button. We decided it was a bad idea to redirect people to our sister site… instead, it’s easier for the user to have everything all on the same page, hence we’ve implemented a new Custom Search feature. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

Jack

Can you really make money out of typos on eBay? Of course you can!

Someone decided to sell a 200 year old bottle of ale on eBay, but misspelled the brand name. Instead of titling the item ‘allsopp’s arctic ale’, the person listed it as ‘allsop’s arctic ale’.

Someone found this mistake (we’d like to think they used our typo hunting service, but who knows?), and realizing the true value of the bottle spent $300 on it.

This budding entrepreneur then re-listed the bottle… the result? $503,300.00! That’s right, typos really do work.

Here’s the original listing of the item: Link

And here’s the item once it had been spelled correctly: Link

To anyone looking to sell rare/expensive items on eBay - check your spelling, or our users will fleece you!

People have been suggesting a more flexible method of selecting which categories to trawl. We’ve been listening and the result is now live on the website!

You can now create any combination of category selection. TinyTrawler will pick up which combination you have selected at the time of opening TinyTrawler and then stick to that selection. You can thus have 5 different TinyTrawler windows open, all with their own unique selection of categories.

We’ve also optimized some of the sites routines, making things faster and fixed some bugs people have been having with browsers such as Safari and Konqueror.

We’ve have a fantastic response from our users… in fact, we’ve had so many great suggestions, we’re already planning TypoTrawler v2!

Amusingly, several of our more vigilant users have spotted typos on our own site… were they the result of extended periods of late night coding or an intentional joke? We’ll let you decide!

Finally, we’ve just signed up to Technorati, here’s the confirmation link they needed:

Technorati Profile

Instead of buying the dedicated server mentioned in the previous post, we had a last minute change of heart and went for a VPS instead. It’s a pretty cool idea - the provider gets an expensive, high powered, server and installs virtualization software on it (in our case, the excellent Xen). They then rent out chunks of the server to people like us, each chunk having it’s own operating system installed.  So it’s like having your own low-end dedicated server, except on better hardware and for less money!

We’ve also been busily optimizing the back-end… automated tasks that used to take almost an hour are now done in 15 minutes and more filters have been put on the results to improve the quality of typo’ed item served up to you guys.

It’s been a busy month but we’re finally nearing completion. It’s amazing to look back at all the frantic scribblings on notepads… holes that have been plugged and new ones arising due to the previous being plugged. We’re only a small team and our javascript experience was lacking and as such this was where most of problems were arising. Thankfully most of these troubles are behind us and TypoTrawler is becoming more and more polished by the day.

We’re about to get our hands on a nice new dedicated server and then the frantic promotion of TypoTrawler will begin!

TypoTrawler has been under development for several weeks now and it’s finally starting to come together. We’ve already come a long way but there’s much left to be done. This blog will aim to chart our progress and possibly even entertain someone along the way!