In my neverending quest to save time I was wondering...is there a way to find out what is the most popular feature on this site (my guess is the forum) and make a direct link button on the home page right above the counter (theres a perfect space for it). I figure there is space to put in up to 5 buttons if you choose. I guess its more for convenience than time saving since it really doesn't take that much time to find the forum link.

secondly, the price tracker, how is it updated? I looked at the recent sales comlumn and they seem to be quite old (over a year or two).

Thanks
Gabe

There are ways to judge the "most popular" features, but my web stats package doesn't do a very good job of it. I would have to upgrade it.

As for adding a link to the forum on the home page, there are two. In the menu, of course, but also in the second paragraph of the text on that page. I rather feel that two links is already redundant on such a small site!



It's updated by all of us... or "not updated", as the case may be. Anytime you want to enter a selling price for an item, browse to it's page in the puzzle database and click the "add a recent sale price" link at the bottom of the page. It's a small form, and the information is updated online immediately.

Go enter some!

The reason that most of the price information is over a year old is because most of it comes from a collection of about 600 prices that I kept track of from March 2002 to Christmas 2003. That's when I stopped spending an hour a day on eBay, so that's why the volume of data drops off drastically at that point.

If eBay didn't change it's auction page format every 10 days I'd be able write a few scripts that could parse auction pages automatically, meaning all a human would have to do is enter the auction ID, and the script would monitor the auction, and record the final sale price. Apparently, there's also some sort of eBay developer's program where you pay (of course) to get access to certain types of data in XML files.

If you have any ideas for other ways to make this system more user friendly, please let me know. I find it rather disappointing that it's not being used to its full potential, and if there was anything I could do to prop it up, I would definitely try to find time for it.

Sandy