Sqlog

Sqoot + Blog

Gigantic > Huge

Up until yesterday, we've had 6 different image sizes to use ranging from 32px wide all the way up 150px. Well as it turns out, some people don't think "huge" is huge enough.

Now, there's a new image size you can use: gigantic. It's 200px wide. Like our other images sizes you can also specify a gigantic square, if you're into that sort of thing.

We're still at the mercy of our deal providers to give us higher quality originals, so some pictures will come out blurry. Stay tuned for a parameter that will allow you to search for deals with images of particular dimensions.

Bill O'Reilly Rebuilds Your Sqoot Dashboard

Seeing your pageviews and clicks in real-time is something that we think you should expect from a daily deal platform. Unfortunately, it's not easy to do. We store every search and click and since we handle a lot of searches it adds up to quite a bit of data. The challenge becomes slicing out just your information when you load your dashboard. That kind of filtering just takes computing time, which is exactly why up until today your dashboard data has been up to 24 hours behind. It buys us time to crunch the numbers.

Not anymore! From now on, we'll do it live!

Your dashboard will report pageviews and clicks instantly.

Best of all: you don't have to lift a finger. You'll notice on your dashboard that there's a new time-range option, "Today." It's the default. As people view and click on deals in your site or app your dashboard will update immediately. Pretty cool.

Real-time too real for you? We're all ears.

A shout out to Redis To Go, who made this feature possible with their simple Redis hosting.

Sqoot Goes Topless

We believe in transparency because we've got nothing to hide. We've got nothing to hide because we're transparent. That's just how we roll.

One of our most frequently asked questions is: "what are the commissions for each deal provider?" In the spirit of transparency, we've exposed all commissions through our API for every provider and every deal. So now:

  • Offers API includes a commission attribute. This is the dollar amount you'll earn when the deal is purchased.
  • Providers API includes a commission (or percentage) that we've negotiated with the deal provider.
  • Search for deals or order the results by commission. Read more.
  • Widget embeds the commission amount in the HTML as a data attribute.

So what? Well let's say you offer Schrute Bucks to your users. You can offer Schrute Bucks based on the deal's commission. Once they buy a deal, you can use our Commission API to make sure they get the right points.

Look, we'll even prove it with a demo: incentivized daily deal program. Get nerdy and view the source to see how we did that using only daily deal widget and some JavaScript.

We thrive on your feedback, so fire away with your feedback.

Get Ultra-local with Precision Geolocation

Twitter-location-based-tweets
Happy friday! We recently launched a new geolocation engine that dramatically increases our accuracy when it comes to geo-searches.

A geo-search is any search where you supply a latitude and longitude. With Sqoot it's super simple: just pass the latitude and longitude in to the location parameter, separated with a comma. By default we return results around those coordinates according to our "best-deal" algorithm, but you can get more specific if you like: just supply a radius (in miles). We can now deliver results accurately down to a tenth of a mile!

Read our API docs for more details!

We think it's pretty cool and as always welcome any feedback!

Introducing More Categories, National Deals, & Search Shortcuts

We've been cranking away on some new features you're going to freak out about. You might want to sit down for this:

  • More Categories: Deliver uber-relevant deals across our 50+ new categories! Tailor your deal feed with new categories now (current record is 52 seconds).
  • National Deals: Deals work best when they're local but national deals are cool too. By default, we show national deals when no local results exist.
  • Search Shortcuts: We created Shortcuts to make it easy to access deals from deal providers that support faster, more detailed reporting. Display new deals as quickly as we add them with Shortcuts.