DealsPlus is out of Beta!

In case you couldn’t read the title…….DealsPlus is out of beta!

Check it out: http://dealspl.us/

A lot of hard work has gone into this and we’re all really excited about it.

One of the cool new things is the addistion of DP Tools.

DP Tools allows webmasters to add a plus button to their pages so that their users can add their pages to DealsPlus without leaving their site.  Very cool!  (and suspiciously similar to the digg button

Here’s a working example (click the plus):

There’s also a much cooler button that shows the number of times your page has been plus’d, but it uses javascript and wordpress keeps deleting the script tags from my post……

DealsPlus Redesign: Sneak Peak

We have been working hard on a complete redesign of our flagship website DealsPlus for the last few months.

I’m happy to say that we are very, very close of officially launching the new version of the site and I’d like to invite the few readers I have to check out the new design before everyone else!

Feel special?  You should!

You can check it out at: http://new.dealspl.us/

If you want to provide feedback, please do so by commenting on this post.

Happy Holidays!

Wishing you and your families a safe and happy holiday season.

Happy Holidays!

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?

Hello Word!

Hi everyone.

In case the title is confusing, this is my web blog. 

There’s not much here now, but here’s a little teaser……

My next post will be a technical article on how to hack sendmail so that it will choose smart host authentication credentials based on the sender’s email address rather than the host name of the smart host.

This issue is what inspired me to start a blog.  I searched all over the web and couldn’t find anything related to this anywhere so I wanted to record it for my own reference and to share it with others who might be looking for the same information.

See you soon!