Blog for U's Bargain Network

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We are pleased to announce the newly improvement of U’s Bargain Network. Over the last a few days, the web interface of U’s Bargain Network has been improved. A wide range of bookmark buttons were added to each individual deal. You can click any button to bookmark a deal to your favorite web service. All web addresses for the bookmark are permalink. It is good idea to bookmark what you are looking for and track its price trend. Please leave your comments and suggestions. We will respond them quickly.

U’s Bargain Network is essentially a large virtual mall for computer, electronics, gaming, and entertainment devices. It collects and compiles discounted products  from prestigious online stores, such as buy.com, newegg.com, and amazon.com etc. Every page of U’s Bargain Network has three cloud tag frames on the right side: keyword, brand, and company. If you know what you want, directly click the right keyword cloud tag, it will open the product page relevant to the keyword. If you know what brand products you want, click the cloud tag in brand tag frame. Same thing for the well known companies. Since the pages were pregenerated, you can open them in no time.  If you try to get products with most recent price cut, you can browse the home page of  U’s Bargain Network. Prices of all products on this website will be updated daily. So by visit U’s Bargain Network frequently, you will eye the best deals happening online.

We at U’s Bargain Network collect and compile deals across the Internet every  day. Best deals will be selected based on 1) Must be current and 2) Lowest price by comparing with price history. Since we have Twitter account (@usbargains), we post these best deals to Twitter to help general consumers like you. To do that manually it is tedious and error-prone. We have developed a nice PERL script to help us do this. It can be modified and adopted to other purpose. We’d like to share this with you here. 

==============

#!/usr/bin/perl

# include libraries

#——————————-

require 5.6.0;

use warnings;

use strict;

use DBI;

use Time::Local;

use Data::Dumper;

if ($#ARGV != 3) {

    print “usage: twitter_friends username password\n”;

    exit;

}

my $username = $ARGV[0];

my $password = $ARGV[1];

my $newdeal  = $ARGV[2];

my $direct   = $ARGV[3];

my $dbname   = “your mysql database name”;

my $dbh;

my $sql;

my $sth;

my $todayStr;

getTodayStr();

getConnected();

if ($newdeal != 1) { 

$sql = “SELECT price, name, id_items FROM deals “.

“WHERE (expiration_date >= ‘$todayStr’) AND (imagefile <> ”) AND featured = 1;”;

}

else

{

$sql = “SELECT price, name, id_items FROM deals “.

“WHERE (expiration_date >= ‘$todayStr’) AND (imagefile <> ”) “.

“ORDER BY id_items DESC “.

“LIMIT 0,18;”;

}

updateStatus();

disConnected();

#############################################

#

# send status update to twitter 

#

sub updateStatus {

$sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);

$sth->execute();

my ($price, $name_items, $id_items);

$sth->bind_columns(\$price, \$name_items, \$id_items);

while ($sth->fetch()) 

{

my $price_str = “”; 

if ($price > 0.0)

{

$price_str = “[\$".$price."]“;

}

my $short_name = substr($name_items, 0, 70); 

my $url = “http://usbargains.net/deals/$id_items.html”;

if ($direct == 1)

{

$url = “http://usbargains.net/items/usb_$id_items.html”;

}

my $status=”Deal-”.$price_str.” “.$short_name.” “.$url;

#print $status.”\n”;

$status =~ s/([^A-Za-z0-9])/sprintf(”%%%02X”, ord($1))/seg;

my $cmd = “curl -X POST -u $username:$password \”http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=”.$status.”\” >/dev/null”;

system($cmd);

}

$sth->finish();

}

#############################################

#

# connect to database and generate a handle

#

sub getConnected {

# return the database handle object to the caller

# Set the parameter values for the connection

#——————————-

my $host=”localhost”;

my $connectionInfo = “DBI:mysql:$dbname;$host”;

my $databaseUser = “your database username”;

my $databasePw = “your database password”;

# Connect to the database

# Note this connection can be used to 

# execute more than one statement

# on any number of tables in the database

#——————————-

$dbh = DBI->connect($connectionInfo, $databaseUser, 

   $databasePw) || die “Connect failed: $DBI::errstr\n”;    

}

######################################

#

# disconnect the database handle

#

sub disConnected {

$dbh->disconnect();

}

######################################

#

# generate today’s date string

#

sub getTodayStr {

# get local time

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$iDay,$iMonth,$iYear,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime time;

$iYear = 1900 + $iYear;

$iMonth++;

$todayStr = “$iYear-$iMonth-$iDay”;

}

Maya 24, a Facebook account was setup for our business. Visit it at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Us-Bargain-Network/86524726879.  We will use this account to connect to general consumers align with our Twitter account (@usbargains).

The SEARCH function of www.usbargains.net was designed recently. By combining fast web server and AJAX technology, the speed of search function has been dramatically improved. It totally get rid of the overhead time to generate the whole page by using AJAX technique. In addition, full text search has been enabled. You can search multiple keywords and search results will be listed in order of relevance.

In the right hand side, there is a cloud tag box for brands. All well known brands are included in the cloud tags. Use your mouse move over each brand name, you can find out how many deals for that particular brand. Click a brand name, a new page will open and only include deals for that brand. This is shortcut for brand shopper.

There is price history graph, which is updated every day, on every item page. This graph reflects the recent price history of the product you are viewing. There are multiple situations. Price of a product can go up and down frequently. In that case, you can monitor the product closely and buy it at lowest price. Or it can go down quickly. If that is the case, you may wait a few days to see what will happen. Another situation is price go up recently and stay high. You know its price was low at one time point. You can wait a while until its proce drop the lowest or even lower.

Cloud tags can be found on the right hand side of every page on the U’s Bargain Netwoork website. You can click tags relevant to what you are looking for.  In this way, you can quickly found excellent deals.