Archive for Favorites
December 3, 2008 at 11:08 am · Filed under Favorites, Miscellaneous · By GreenMamba
You asked for it, and you got it: a way to organize all your Favorite shops and listings. But, it’s not a product of Etsy engineering. etsyfeeder comes courtesy of Adam Kendall, husband of Etsy seller soapdeli.
I asked Adam to tell us a little something about his Favorites-sorting application, and this is what he had to say:
etsyfeeder in it’s original incarnation was a simple little application that allowed Etsy sellers to produce an RSS feed they could hand out that included pictures and “add to cart” buttons to help promote their shops. From there, it spiraled to other features that Etsy users were looking for that Etsy hasn’t seen fit to provide, or has basically been too slow in implementing. Like Etsy sellers, third party developers can often react to the marketplace quicker than can the larger entities like Etsy, Inc. So, since I don’t craft, but wanted to support my wife in her Etsy endeavors, and support Etsy itself, I decided to extend the original RSS feeds to managing favorite items and shops through a tagging interface. So my tagline is “handmade code for Etsy people”, because the site is crafted with my own two hands and knowledge.
Since Etsy itself is a fairly interactive experience and pushes the boundaries of what the web is all about, I wanted to push that envelope as well. So the site now includes the following features:
— Allows you to dynamically add and remove tags
— You can drag and drop your items and shops into your defined tags
— You can quickly get a list of all items and even untagged items
— Hovering your mouse over an item or shop will popup a description and price if it’s an item
— You can sort your list of items by price or name, and shops by name
— For all your favorite shops, you can get an RSS feed with the pictures of all items
— You can still generate an RSS feed for your shop with pictures by using the link once logged in
The application is completely cross platform. I have tested it under Firefox on both Mac and Linux. It has also been tested under Safari for Mac, IE6 and IE7 for Windows and is functionally the same under all.
Something that I am considering for the next release of the software:
— Ability to save “templates” of items for sale so you can quickly “relist” items
I haven’t quite got all the details worked out on this feature, so I’m not sure I will be able to pull it off, but it’s on the horizon if I can submit the data in a way that Etsy is expecting.
Of course I am open to other suggestions from Etsy users for features that they would to see and will do what I can to get those features implemented as well.
So a big Thank you! goes out to Adam (and soapdeli) for this handy-dandy and much-requested tool: http://etsyfeeder.appspot.com/
If you take this application for a test drive, be sure to stop by this announcement thread to leave a bit of feedback for Adam (Etsy username akendall1 ).
PLEASE NOTE that this app will not currently work with private Fave settings.
update Dec 11 by JB:
The stats portion of the etsyfeeder site has been discontinued
http://etsyfeeder.appspot.com/stats
(you will only see the following message if you are logged in)
Statistical data from Etsy
Oops.
Etsy has decided to shut off access to these stats without warning.
What’s this mean for you? These stats may no longer work, or if they do, they are horribly out of date. I’m keeping them up for archival purposes at this point. Want these stats back? Perhaps an email campaign to Etsy.com would work. Who knows. I really wish I could keep providing services like these to folks, but it appears that those that be at Etsy just aren’t willing to work with folks. It’s about community my ass.
Update: 12-10-2008
Chad Dickerson, the new IT Guy in Charge has decided to reach out. This won’t necessarily bring these stats back, but at least it’s a start. Maybe Etsy does in fact give a damn about it’s users and those of us who are trying to provide tools that make your Etsy experience better. Only time will tell. I realize it’s hard to ask all of you to have patience when you’ve been waiting for these things for so long, but it’s all I can ask at this point. Thank you for your continued support.
November 16, 2008 at 9:22 pm · Filed under Favorites, Miscellaneous, Views / Counters · By JB
The fabulous heart-o-matic tools used by so many Etsians have moved from Majaba.com to a new site: http://www.craftcult.com/.
The heart-o-matic tool was developed by Julian of Juln.etsy.com, and the new site is co-owned by Julian and Karena of Magicjelly.etsy.com.
If you had the old majaba site bookmarked, it will redirect to the new craftcult site.
For previous articles on the Heart-o-matic, please see
http://etsynews.com/626/heart-o-matic-is-back-and-better-than-ever/
http://etsynews.com/577/uen-exclusive-interview-with-the-creator-of-the-heart-o-matic/
May 29, 2008 at 9:00 am · Filed under Bugs, Favorites · By GreenMamba
Members have been reporting that sellers and items that they have added to their Favorites are vanishing without a trace. These are not instances of items expiring or being deleted by the seller, nor of sellers closing shop, which leaves behind a greyed-out box where the item/seller used to be. Some members report having to ‘heart’ the same sellers over and over again, only to have them continually disappear.
Despite these reports, RD says:
If you don’t see something in your favorites list anymore, it’s because it is unavailable for some reason.
If it is a listing, it may be deleted or in edit mode. If it’s a seller, they may no longer have an active account.
The favorites system is working properly, and as far as we’ve seen there have been no confirmed cases of favorites being lost.
If you have any information you believe to be evidence otherwise, please let us know! :]
Posted at 9:48 pm, May 28 2008 EST - Report this post
Click here to follow the current thread, and/or add your own experiences with this bug.
An older thread documenting the same issue can be found here.
February 22, 2008 at 9:28 pm · Filed under Favorites · By Deja Vu
For those who had not yet heard, the Heart-o-Matic is up and running again! A wonderful feature has been added by Juln – a hearts-to-views ratio per item, as well as an overall hearts-to-views ratio. For more indepth information, see our previous UEN article. Don’t forget that the Heart-o-Matic is now hosted at Etsytools. If you haven’t been to Etsytools lately, it’s definitely worth a visit! Etsytools and Heart-o-matic are unaffiliated with Etsy and run by Etsy members, Interrobang, Vertis and Juln.
January 18, 2008 at 7:57 pm · Filed under Favorites · By JB
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5423386&page=1
Etsy has come up with their own solution to the hearts page crashing browsers for people with a large number of hearts.
jared says:
The Hearts Me feature has been modified slightly. For those sellers and items with more than 100 hearts, they are now shown in batches of 100.
Two new buttons now exist below the hearts spiral that allow you to see the next or previous batch of 100 hearts.
The change was made for performance gains. Enjoy!
For our previous coverage of how to view all your hearts quickly and easily, see this article. This change has temporarily broken the Heart-o-matic, but stay tuned and hopefully that can be fixed.
January 12, 2008 at 7:41 am · Filed under Favorites, UEN Exclusive · By JB
How are your hearts today?
If you haven’t seen it yet, the newest exciting Etsy tool is not on Etsy at all, it’s a third-party tool called the Heart-O-Matic. This is an unofficial site run and designed by Etsy seller Juln.etsy.com.
The tool has multiple functions:
All of the Heart-o-Matic results are on simple, quick-loading HTML pages. (no flash dizzy swirlies!) If you have so many hearts that trying to view them crashes your browser, the Heart-o-Matic will make heart tracking and stat keeping much easier. This is also especially useful for tracking new hearts and views to determine the effectiveness of any ads you might have bought, either showcase ads on Etsy or ads outside of Etsy.
Juln agreed to give an exclusive interview to UEN about this new sellers tool.
UEN: What inspired you to create the Heart-O-Matic?
Juln: Hearts are the one of the most important pieces of data a seller can use to gauge response to activity on Etsy. If someone has added your shop as a favorite, it means they liked something about your presence enough that they wish to return. That’s great for a retailer to know.
On the forums now and then, you hear of people with problems viewing their hearts. I had a slower computer for most of last year and it took a long time to view mine. Worse, many serious sellers were unable to view their data at all, as lists of over 2000 or so don’t work very well with standard flash viewer.
I wanted a way to quickly total up my hearts, and see the latest people who added me. After learning about the api access structure from Etsy’s jobs page, I saw the possibility to create my own viewer for the data provided by that system. I was pleased to see that the data also included the time of day, which makes it even more useful to sellers.
UEN: How long did it take to create, and what was the hardest part?
Juln: It took about 3 weeks of work, probably in a large part due to the requirement for me to figure out what I was doing! The system has been in a functional state for the past 2 weeks or so, and during that time I’ve done a lot to fix and improve the code. I found one of the most challenging parts was writing the page numbering code, actually. Planning the flow of logic within the programs is interesting. Writing the program has actually been pretty straightforward, and it works, but the difficult part has been to determine the right way to do things.
UEN: What’s your background in developing? Do you do this for your “day job”?
Juln: My last programming experiences were with Logo and Basic on a Commodore 64, maybe Arexx and Shell scripts on the Amiga. I’ve also done a bit of php and mysql work prior to this, so I don’t have very extensive programming experience to say the least. I’ve used exclusively Linux on my computer for years, though, so I guess you could describe me as an avid computer hobbyist.
UEN: Are you working on any other cool Etsy-related tools?
Juln: I have ideas for all sorts of tools involving Etsy! I’ve been pondering program that let you import your favorites from Etsy, to sort and categorize them. Enhanced view tracking that works item by item is another project I’m thinking about. I’ve been considering adding more data analysis to the Heartomatic, such as stats about times of the day people added you, and how many in each month. I would really like to create a tool to speed the Etsy listing process, a la the Turbo Lister or Auctiva for eBay - a program like that could make listing a lot faster, allow you to schedule listings, duplicate listings, all sorts of things that would help me personally as a seller, in addition to many other people.
UEN: What new feature would you most like to see Etsy develop?
Juln: After this experience, I would have to say a documented, thorough public API would be the best. That would allow anyone knowledgable to create their own features and interfaces for Etsy. Lots of other sites, such as Flickr, Google, or Amazon have APIs that allow outside folks to access their databases and write programs to extract, send, sort, and display information. eBay has a ‘token’ system to manage logins for outside programmers to allow people to access their logged-in data, and a lot of what I am interested, like the listing tool or sold history analysis tools, would only be possible if users could access their private account data.
UEN: You are a glass artist and you have an Etsy shop. What is your favorite and least favorite part of making your art?
Juln: The glass is quite fun to work with, no doubt! Blowing glass for an occupation rather than for a hobby is a bit demanding, I suppose. I’d say I don’t like dealing with the physical hazards of glass work so much these days, such as eye radiation or the exposure to weird metals and glass dust. As far as the commerce end of things, I find creating good photographs of the glass is much more of a challenge than actually making the pieces! On the positive side, working with the color chemistry is the most interesting aspect. Borosilicate chemistry is complex and interesting, and the appearance of the glass can change in somewhat predictable but often unexpected ways. Seeing glass rods floop and melt, and change from black to silvery blue or from clear to bright purple is fascinating and magical. Probably my favorite aspect of creating glass beads is how it has brought me into contact with the fabulous community of jewelry designers and crafters on Etsy!
Thanks for inviting me to answer these questions, Jen!
And thank you for building the Heart-o-Matic, Juln!
September 9, 2007 at 4:04 pm · Filed under Bugs, Favorites · By JB
A minor bug this morning caused all sellers to see Jared’s hearts when looking at their own.
jared says:
This morning in I saw a minor bug report about something that’s been bothering jmday for a long time:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5224621
It was a relatively easy fix so I decided to do it. The fix was made and I committed the new code.
Before uploading, I made the mistake of forgetting to remove one line of debug code that allows me to work on these things locally. This one line basically forces Hearts Me to look at my own hearts, instead of checking to see who is logged in.
After checking in the code I went to brew a cup of coffee. On my return, it was not hard to notice the 12 new threads and nearly 1000 posts showing me my error!
All is fixed now, and I apologize for the momentary glitch.
(If you are still seeing my hearts, please clear you cache, thank you.)
Posted at 2:07 pm, September 9 2007 EST
September 2, 2007 at 11:08 pm · Filed under Favorites, Privacy · By Elizabeth
Previously, if you chose to keep your favorites private, the heart would show up as labeled “anonymous.”. Jared has changed it to say “secret admirer.”
Might not be accurate, but certainly less scary to those new to Etsy.
August 7, 2007 at 11:27 am · Filed under Bugs, Favorites · By starrydesigns
Users have reported that some sold favorites say “$0.00″ instead of “sold”.
RevolvingDork has fixed the bug as per this thread and all sold favorites should now say “sold”. If you still have issues, do post it in the bugs section.
