Yesterday after spending time trying to win a $25 dollar cheese voucher and failing, I decided to investigate how the auctions work a little.
The first thing I noticed was that I was getting snipped by people in the last few seconds, yet it was hard to know when the last few seconds were.
So for the next cheese auction (item_id 145 unit_id 395) the URL of the closing time is:http://www.mintshot.co.nz/components/com_cat/getBidTime.php?item_id[]=145&unit_id[]=395
this currently displays:145x395-closes in 4 mins and 49 secs*
this can be hit every second, giving you quite good time count down.
the bidding history can be found at:http://www.mintshot.co.nz/components/com_cat/getBidStatus.php?adv_id=145&unit_id=395
which returns this as html
I’ve shown a picture here due to the actual result is 9kB (1.7kB html 7.3kB inline styles).
Also of interest is that the winners time is shown 30 minutes before the previous bid. WTF!
I had planned to pull the past cheese auctions and show the history of the winning prices. But my own Internet went funny last night, and Mintshot is down this morning, sighting heavy traffic.
Other issues:
- When watching an auction, only the time left refreshes. This means you have to reload the whole page to see if the current leader or auction history has changed.
- There is a large amount of debugging code left in the live site, but commented out. You can almost see the developers figuring out how to get it working by what is left in there.
- Explicit styles set on every element. Not only does it bloat the page, and makes more work for the servers, but horror if they decide to re-theme the site.