I’ll get back to posting some more CakePHP tips soon. I promise I have a bunch of ideas queued up.

In the meantime I wanted to announce my latest CakePHP site, InStalker.com. InStalker is a site to help people get hard to find products like the Nintendo Wii and DS Lite. I know there are tons of other sites that already do this. Two things I didn’t see very often on the other guys is Twitter support and Ajax. There is no need to sign up for anything. You just leave the site open in your browser and it will automatically alert you when $latest_trendy_product is in stock.

It’s using the latest beta 1.2 release (which rocks). A lot of the code and design came from RSStalker.com, so it really didn’t take me that long to put together.

So if you’re looking for a Wii (still not in stock very often and when it is you usually need to buy as part of bundle) or DS Lite (comes in stock often, but you have to be fast) check it out.

Popularity: 84% [?]

RSStalker, a site I built almost two years ago, was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about price tracking. It’s only one line and not overly flattering, but still kind of cool. I actually talked to the reporter who wrote the piece earlier in the week about the site and price tracking in general. Thanks Shelly Banjo and WSJ!

Popularity: 25% [?]

RSStalker.com has been doing pretty will with affiliate sales lately, so I’ve been looking to re-invest some of that money into the site. I’ve tried a few ads with limited success. I was randomly watching SeeMeWin the other night after a friend e-mailed me an article about the site. SeeMeWin is a videocast where they scratch lottery tickets. Nick, one of the guys doing the video cast, mentioned they were selling ads on the “scratch pad” (where they scratch the tickets). I figured it couldn’t perform any worse then the ads I’m buying now, so for $20 I got RSStalker on the scratch pad. Yea, users can’t click on anything so they’re is no real way to track conversions. I’ll post an update Wednesday with how well this worked.

Here’s what it looked like:

Popularity: 43% [?]

I decided it was a good time to make the new RSStalker.com live. I’ve been testing it for the past few days without any real issues. The only thing I’m worried about is how it will handle the load from the full user base. I’ve got some caching going so it shouldn’t be too bad. I figured now would be a good time to launch, since if something went wrong I’d have the weekend to fix it.

I’m a bit disappointed that CakePHP 1.2 still has issues with caching the home page of your site. I solved this before by doing an Apache redirect, but I don’t want to do that here. If I get some time I’m going to try to find a better solution.

Anyway, enjoy the new site. Leave a comment if you have an issue.

Popularity: 31% [?]