Often I feel, instead of writing about what you’re going to do – why not just spend that time doing it! However I have a few things, short and long term I’d like to discuss, and  I welcome any feedback.

Site hosting

The site uses shared hosting, as the name implies you share the server applications and resources with other websites. This makes it cheap, but you don’t have the benefits of private server hosting like 99.99% up-time with redundancy. I become hyper-aware when the site goes down for a few minutes because the host is applying server updates.

Long term I would like to move the site to a private hosting solution, but only when the site has enough traffic to cover the cost of doing so. The additional processing power will help with the traffic load, and the scripts to import product data.

Browsing by Lens Mount

If I implemented the ability to categorise products, I’d only be able to apply it to those retailers who readily provide sufficient information to do so. If a category only contains half the product data it should, then it really isn’t a viable solution.

The plan will be to have a ‘master database’ of cameras and lenses. This would provide another entry point, an alternative to typing in the search box. You choose the camera mount then you choose a lens which will trigger a predefined custom search and provide related results.

Search Improvements

Recent developments mean that as of today we have the following functionality:

• Exact Match – You can apply quotes to search terms(s) for exact matches. e.g. if you search for Nikon “D50” only results with D50 appear not, D500 and D5000.
• Negative Match – You can use a hyphen before a search term to remove results containing that word, if you wanted to search for Nikon lenses you may add -sigma to remove any sigma related results.
• Ignoring / Forward Slash – when any comparison of product name and search terms are made the / will be ignored. This means if you type F4 it will get results for F4 and F/4 and vice versa.
• Alternative Keywords – I have developed the facility to add hidden keywords to products, mostly because there are multiple ways people write M43, Micro Four Thirds, M4/3, 4/3. Now when you type M43, it will also show results for those alternative keywords. This is also handy for frequent misspelling. The following lists are already implemented, and will take effect within 24 hours. If you have any suggestions please comment on this blog post! Thanks
  • m43,mft,micro four thirds,m4/3,4/3
  • mark i,mk1
  • mark ii,mk2
  • mark iii,mk3
  • mark iv,mk4
  • mark v,mk5
  • xt-1,x-t1
  • xt-2,x-t2
  • xt-3,x-t3
  • xt-4,x-t4
  • xt-5,x-t5

Please share the site

The more people who use this site, the more I can invest into making it the best it can be. If you feel the site is a useful tool, please share with others. Whether that be a camera club, a forum, a Facebook group or with like-minded friends, it all helps. Thank you.