Sazze Mobile

Sazze Mobile is officially live!

To use it, just point your mobile phone’s web browser to http://m.sazze.com and start searching.

Currently, you can search for products and get reviews, price comparisons, and see reviewers’ profiles.

For more information (and a chance to win some really nice prizes) check out http://www.sazze.com/answer/new-feature-sazze-mobile/1090

This is a very handy service that could really save you some money this holiday season (or any time you’re at a store and wish you could get some reviews or a price comparison).

One user was given an instant discount when he showed the store manager the lower price he had just looked up on Sazze Mobile!

So check it out. 

Pingback on blogspot? Of course not!

Pingback is probably one of the greatest things for blogging since…..well…..blogging itself.

If you don’t know what pingback is, check out this well written article: What are Trackbacks and Pingbacks at WordPress?

Anyways, we just implemented the XML-RPC pingback protocol in PHP for Sazze because we’re allowing users to link to their relevant blog articles when they write reviews (see it in action).

In order to share the love, we ask that our users, in turn, place a link to their Sazze review on their blog.  However, with pingback we can make the link exchange automatic and that is win-win for everyone.  We promote our users’ blog articles on Sazze and we get a pingback link in their blog article’s comments.

Unfortunately, it seems that blogspot does not support the pingback protocol.  Instead they have a proprietary system called “linkbacks”.

Basically, blogspot searches blogs and includes them in its “blog search” index.  If your blog happens to be included in that search index, then blogspot will detect your links to their hosted blogs when it updates its index, and include a “linkback” link to your article on the blogspot blog that you referenced.

For everyone else whose blog is not indexed by blogspot, you’re out of luck.  No “linkbacks” for you.

Personally, I think this really sucks!  Blogspot is one of the larger blog hosting sites, and the fact that they don’t support one of the best open standards for inter-blog communication and article sharing is just disgusting.

I blame Google’s influence.  They like to pretend that they aren’t like Microsoft, but to them, their way is always the right/only way.  Hmmmm………sounds like Microsoft, no?

HA Network Attached Storage (NAS): Followup

As I mentioned at the end of my previous post (HA Network Attached Storage (NAS)), the vendor whose product I’m hoping will solve my HA NAS woes put together a demo for me last week and I must say that I was impressed!

Let’s face it, we’re only planning on spending around 6K (total) and they put together a demo for me.  That’s a class act for you.  The only other vendors even remotely interested in providing a demo were the ones charging 75K or more for their “entry-level” product that targets the SMB.  I wonder how well that marketing strategy is working?  Do you know many SMBs looking to spend 75K on a storage system?  I don’t.

Anyways, the demo was good and the servers passed my fail over tests, so we’re purchasing them.  It’s an Active-Backup config, but it will do nicely.  Especially since we’re running our current file server into the ground with our traffic growth. 
 
Oh yeah, the vendor is Aberdeen.  Check ‘em out.