Argos Stock Checker - CheckArgos.com (Jul 15 - Preview of new site now avaialbe)

Basq

daytob wrote: »

I cant seem to access the mobile version.

Renewed hosting with my hosting company back in February, and have had nothing but downtime since. Am looking into it now.. should be back online shortly!

daytob wrote: »

do i need an app.

But while we're on the topic of an app..



Stay tuned!

daytob

Thanks, got on using checkargos.com and saving it as a bookmark for when I am out. A droid app would be brill.

Cheers

Basq

daytob wrote: »

Thanks, got on using checkargos.com and saving it as a bookmark for when I am out. A droid app would be brill.

Cheers

iOS only for time being.. but will think about an Android app alright.

Mobile Version should be back now.

daytob

What am I doing wrong?

Basq

daytob wrote: »

What am I doing wrong?

Don't think there is a mobile.checkargos.com?

witnessmenow's website is http://www.checkargos.com, and my mobile website is http://www.basquille.net/argos

daytob

Cool, thanks for not pointing out I am an idiot

Basq

daytob wrote: »

Cool, thanks for not pointing out I am an idiot

No worries!

Might mention it to witnessmenow that I'd have no problem with him incorporating my mobile site onto a mobile subdomain of checkargos.com.

Might make it easier in the long run as he could redirect to that then on detection of a mobile device.

witnessmenow

I'll give you a shout later Basq. I would be interested in the subdomain but I'm not a massive fan of browser detection though



(there is an xkcd for everything )


While I'm here a may as well comment on a couple of other things:

• Slaanesh's chrome extension is excellent, I use it all the time now!
• The blancherstown with the unknown status is actually closed (i need to remove it)
• My free hosting with digiweb is up in september (the sites first birthday ), I'll keep the site up for sure but i need to do some looking into what is available
• I still need to fix the clearance sections when they have too much stuff in them
• Im currently working on AN android app (not a checkargos one), once completed I will be moving onto a checkargos one.

And for the figures:

38K regular searches and 18k clearance searches since September

Basq

witnessmenow wrote: »

I'll give you a shout later Basq. I would be interested in the subdomain but I'm not a massive fan of browser detection though



(there is an xkcd for everything )

Yep.. no worries.

I've come across that type of redirect that xkcd is referring to, and I despise it too.

witnessmenow wrote: »

• The blancherstown with the unknown status is actually closed (i need to remove it)

Wasn't aware of that.. ta!

witnessmenow wrote: »

• Im currently working on AN android app (not a checkargos one), once completed I will be moving onto a checkargos one.

The iOS app I've developed is very basic (and I'm planning to submit it to iTunes Connect for approval in the next day or two) - the reason for this is I'm worried Apple may reject it (due to scraping of the Argos site via webpages / requests without prior permission from Argos). Unlike my web app, I don't use your CheckArgos.com scripts - it's independent.

If they don't reject it, I'll branch it out and add more to it.

But with myself on the iOS app and you working on an Droid app, we should have it covered!

Basq

Hi all,

Just a quick heads-up to say the iOS app is now available!

Argos.ie Stock Checker

This app is in early days since I wasn't to roll out a basic version to make sure Apple approved it before rolling out some of the more advanced features such as:

- flagging out-of-stock items and a push notification if that out-of-stock item comes back in stock
- validation of product information as soon as catalogue number is entered (no need to click 'Search')
- recent searches (view recent searches by all users)
- popular searches (view popular searches by all users)
- and more!

This version will be released very shortly.

witnessmenow

For anyone interested I'm after uploading the source code of checkargos.com to github

I have done zero tidying up of the code so please excuse the mess! This was a one person project done in my spare time so it might be short of a few comments

Feel free to do what you want with it, if you use anything from it a acknowledgement would be nice, but not required

Any questions shoot me a pm! (I'm at the euros for the next couple of weeks so my response times might be slow )

Android app will also be on github when i start working on it

witnessmenow

Sorry for the zombie thread update, but i felt this was the best place to inform people.

I've renewed checkargos and am moving hosting providers. I am also going on holidays in a few hours and I havent got a chance to do the port!

A friend of mine is going to look after it, hopefully all will go well and there will be no downtime but there is a potential that there could be some hiccups.

For anyone interested in the numbers since September last year

Regular searches: 52k (1k a week, not too bad )
Clearance searches: 24k

Basq

Nice one witnessmenow... best of luck with the move!

While we're referring to stats - my stats for the Argos Stock Checker (iOS) are as follows:



It's been in the Top 100 apps in 2 countries (UK & Ireland), and was the most downloaded app in the Reference section for Ireland at one stage. Happy enough with those figures considering it's only been online for 12 weeks.

The funny thing is 3,158 (almost half!) of those downloads were from the UK, so the next update is geared primarily at them, although there is something for ye too.

It's more or less done bar a bit of testing - but a busy work schedule, doing an online course in the evenings and little nixers here and there have prevented me from releasing it just yet. Hopefully it'll be out this time next month.

witnessmenow

Hey Guys,

I have started work on an android app this week, things going fairly well so I'm hoping to have V1 released to the market this weekend.

V1 will only do basic search of stock of an item in all the Irish stores.

I'm going to do what is called iterative development, where I will release versions often and add new features with each version.

So I would love to know what kind of things people would like to see from the app. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

For anyone interested in following development progress, there is a link to the apps github page in my sig. Not too much to look at at the moment, but hopefully it will become more interesting in time.

witnessmenow

Firstly apologies if I'm over staying my welcome on BA by posting status updates here (please let me know if I am!)

I uploaded a new version of the site last night, please let me know if there is any issues.

The new version is just a code cleanup, hopefully from a user perspective nothing has changed other than the Blanch store that closed has been removed.

The main reason for this changes is I'm going to leverage the website for the android app. This isn't initially how I set out to do the app, but after a re-think there is a lot of advantages to doing this mainly:

• Code Re-use - if Argos change their site i only need to make changes to the PHP
• Will be a lot lighter on Data usage
• Can keep better stats.

So in last nights update I have also created an entry point for the android app that returns Json objects based on the criteria passed (this is not complete yet)

If anybody is interested in leveraging this entry point for anything feel free to get in touch and we can discuss it (I'm not charging for it or anything like that )

Still hope to have something on the Play store this weekend, fingers crossed as I still need to do my least fave part UI

sgarvan

Just to let you know that the Firefox plugin has stopped working.

When I click on an Argos code, it directs me to the following link with the following error message displayed across the top.

http://www.checkargos.com/index.php?productId=501/1379

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/checkarg/public_html/index.php:40) in /home/checkarg/public_html/index.php on line 62

When you click submit on the site it works off a different page.

http://www.checkargos.com/StockCheckPage.php?productId=5011379

witnessmenow

sgarvan wrote: »

Just to let you know that the Firefox plugin has stopped working.

When I click on an Argos code, it directs me to the following link with the following error message displayed across the top.

http://www.checkargos.com/index.php?productId=501/1379

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/checkarg/public_html/index.php:40) in /home/checkarg/public_html/index.php on line 62

When you click submit on the site it works off a different page.

http://www.checkargos.com/StockCheckPage.php?productId=5011379

Hey

I didn't write the firefox (or any browser) plugin, Slaneesh did. In september i updated the website, which seems to have stopped the plugin from working. As you correctly have pointed out the url for checking stock has changed. I thought I had a allowed the page to be redirected if a product code was passed in to the old page, but from your link i see its not! I'll have a look at it when i get a chance to see if there is anything I can do on my side.

sgarvan

Fair play. Brilliant stuff.
Just spotted it today do said I would say it.

A2LUE42

This Account Has Been Suspended

Crikey, the volume of hits today must be something else.

Hope all is ok. Brilliant idea and website.

witnessmenow

A2LUE42 wrote: »

This Account Has Been Suspended

Crikey, the volume of hits today must be something else.

Hope all is ok. Brilliant idea and website.

Looks like its a black friday in more ways than one!

TL;DR: Site seems back up, but with no stock checking

So the deal is that my account with my hosting package got suspended this morning for too high of load. It is hosted on a basic shared hosting package and has been on the same package since August 2012.

After speaking to them this morning it appears that they have re-nabled the site, but have blocked the php script that does the actual stock checking.

I've been told they can't/won't enable it on the current package, they are recommending I move to a stand alone VPS that costs €85+ Vat a month (I currently pay €85 inc Vat for the year for my current plan). As the site has no montisation I obviously am not going to pay €1000 + Vat a year to host it!

It could possibly be down for the rest of the day as I am in work and cannot spend much/Any time on it. And I need to sort out what I'm going to do with it.

Apologies for the down time!

witnessmenow

Site should be live again now. Its hosted temporarly on Amazon Web Services until I resolve something more permanant

witnessmenow

last update on this for a while, I promise (& hope)

I have moved the site again, it is now hosted on Hp cloud offering. Hopefully it is able for the load! The site may be a bit slower due to it now being hosted in America as opposed to Irelalnd, still seems ok to me though.

Any issues please let me know

podgeandrodge

working great thanks!

quick question - I ordered an item that had only one left in stock but your checker is still saying "1 in stock" whereas Argos correctly now says none available.

Is there a delay in checkargos.com compared to Argos's own checker?

Thanks.

Scarlet42

thanks so much for this site .. you just saved me 20 euro!!

RobbingBandit

The site crashed as there were hundreds of us try to source PS4s on Friday so it was total overload. Site has been a life saver at times thanks for the effort.

witnessmenow

podgeandrodge wrote: »

working great thanks!

quick question - I ordered an item that had only one left in stock but your checker is still saying "1 in stock" whereas Argos correctly now says none available.

Is there a delay in checkargos.com compared to Argos's own checker?

Thanks.

It scrapes Argos site in real time

So the way it works is, you know the page on Argos website that shows you if it is in stock in a particular store? What it does is it loads that page for each store and kind of plucks the useful information out (ie the stock level)

In this case someone must have swooped in under nose unfortunately!

Yeah, the black Friday sale didn't help either! Well I hope someone got a ps4 out of it! All I got was hardship! :pac:

Ash_

witnessmenow wrote: »

Yeah, the black Friday sale didn't help either! Well I hope someone got a ps4 out of it! All I got was hardship! :pac:

Managed to grab a Ps4 on launch day using this site.Thanks a million for this great utility.

gingernut79

witnessmenow wrote: »

Hasn't worked in a while actually. I must get around to finding out whats wrong with it. It was never that popular though typicaly checkargos would have more traffic in a a few days than checksmyths was getting in a month

checkargos is down?

witnessmenow

gingernut79 wrote: »

checkargos is down?

Yeah, working on it at the moment.

Despite me paying a stupid amount of money a month for a website that makes no money ($50), HP have closed my instance as they are not supporting the version I am on any more.

I am in the process of moving provider now. Hope to be finished this evening, but it might be tomorrow by the time everything is working ok

witnessmenow

Ok, should be moved now. Might take a few hours for the DNS to be updated.

For anyone interested I have moved to digitalOceans basic VPS package. This is checkargos 5th hosting package to be on.

For anyone absolutely desperate for some checkargos in the the mean time: http://188.226.243.167/

Cheers to gingernut and CH30h for letting me know it was down!