To our Wishlisting users, don’t worry, there are no plans for it to go away. In fact, you may have noticed the increase in the number of stores we support for price drop notifications. This is because we’re working on leveraging some of the same technologies for both sites.

While some of our users have enjoyed the simplicity of the “have it” and “want it” options on Wishlisting, others have asked for more sophisticated options such as the ability to create and manage multiple wishlists for different things. We’d encourage you to check out Wishpot if you’re looking for some of those more advanced features. Thank you all for your support! As always, feel free to send in comments with questions, suggestions, and feedback.

We designed this feature to be as simple as possible. There aren’t a ton of options to configure - you just decide how often you want to be notified. It works like this:

1. Every day Wishlisting’s spider goes out and checks for price updates on wishes across the site. It doesn’t search stuff you have, just stuff you want.
2. If we find the price is substantially lower than it was when you found it first, we’ll notify you.
3. We won’t notify you again on that item until the price drops again, to a price that was substantially lower than the last price we e-mailed you about.
4. If multiple items on your wishlist drop in price, they’ll be grouped together in a single e-mail.

So… what does “substantially lower” mean? For the time being, it means:

• A 25% drop (or more) in price for wishes under $100 ($1 minimum)
• A 10% drop (or more) in price for wishes over $100

We’ve done some testing and found that this seems to weed out price drops that aren’t interesting, and keep the e-mail down to a minimum. Hopefully the only mail you’ll get is useful mail. In the future, we may make all of this configurable. For now, the feature is dead simple. So… please let us know what you think!

Secondly you may have noticed that, as of April 1st, birthday reminder e-mails were sent (if any of your friends have April birthdays). The approach we took is that, once a month, we’ll batch up all of your friends who’s birthdays are coming up and send them to you in one summary e-mail. This way you won’t get inundated with messages about every single person’s birthday, which is what some sites do. If your birthday is coming up, we’ll give you a reminder ahead of time to update your wishlist if you have friends who are keeping an eye on your birthday.

If you’d like to turn any of this off, you can do so under the “Your settings” section and simply uncheck “Enable monthly birthday reminders.”

Another feature that is just about to pop are the e-mail price drop notifications. Currently wishlisting tracks price drops at 30 of the most popular stores where people are adding wishes. You can see this happening when looking at items on your wishlist:

These are updated on a regular basis, but currently don’t get e-mailed to you. Well, it has become obvious that the site has found some sweet bargains, and the option to be notified by e-mail would be incredibly useful. That feature is coming very shortly, and I’ll write another blog post about the details of how it works when it’s ready.

Unless you’re using a binary collation on your database tables, your indexes are actually case insensitive. (ex. we use utf8_general_ci instead of utf8_bin in MySQL). How can you use this for an optimization? Well if you end up building a site with readable URLs, odds are you’ll put a username in them, like:

http://wishlisting.com/#person/tlianza

For usability, odds are you’ll want to make your URLs case-insensitive, in case someone created a username like Tlianza and someone else tries to navigate to it with tlianza. So, you end up writing a SQL query that looks something like this (ignoring the appropriate SQL injection cleansing for the purposes of a simple example):

SELECT * FROM users WHERE LOWER(user_name)='username_they_entered_lowercased'

Assuming you put an index on the user_name column (which you probably did since you’re going to query on it a lot) by wrapping it in a LOWER you’re actually not using your index anymore, as you’re performing a transformation on what would be the index hash/lookup key. Just take the LOWER out. You’ll be able to use your indexes again, and they’ll remain case insensitive.

The way this works is pretty simple. If you find something in Euros (say, at amazon.fr) it will show up, as you’d expect, in Euros on your wishlist.

Now, we’ll make sure not to average/mix up the currencies on you. You’ll notice the price is only from “1 store.” That’s because it has only been found from one store in that currency. If you’re interested in seeing the prices in other currencies (likely from stores in other countries) you can still see them all in the pricing table further down the page.

Wishlisting is far from perfect from an internationalization perspective (ex. everything defaults to US Dollars everywhere on the site) but hopefully these fixes will help make individual wishlists usable amongst friends anywhere.

Thanks to user metamatik for the suggestions!

It’s located right on your settings page, alongside the other Amazon-related options. When you click it, it goes out and checks your Amazon wishlist, updating your items at Wishlisting. Thanks to users indyjones and dayvi for requesting it.

Some of you may have noticed a few changes around wishlisting recently. Just in time for the holidays, there have been a number of things of interest changing around the site. A few highlights:

	The new “email my wishlist” feature allows you to send your wishlist to friends and family with a click of a button.
	For logged in users, the home page has been collapsed such that the most interesting stuff is near the top.
	A revamped help section is easier on the eyes, with more pictures and less words.
	There’s a bunch of new icon eye-candy to draw your attention to certain overlooked aspects of the site

In addition, you’ll find a table of your friends’ recent activity in the friends section, which really makes that area a whole lot more interesting. We’ve also added the ability to be notified on a monthly basis when your friends are having birthdays, and we’ll send you links to their wishlists. We’re continually adding the ability to do price-fetches at new stores as well, so you should start to see more and more of your wishes show up with updated prices automatically.

Almost all of these changes have come based on feedback from our users, so please continue to send it in!