Click here for more screenshotsThis is an OS/X widget for monitoring the sites woot.com, wine.woot.com, shirt.woot.com, kids.woot.com, sellout.woot.com, home.woot.com, and ... well about six other woot sites, at this point. If you're not sure what that is or why you should bother, I recommend going to those sites and reading up on it. If you just want to look at the widget, there are more screen shots available by clicking on the image to the right.

For the last few revisions, this widget relied upon Woot's API and RSS feed, which has been deprecated. The new API requires membership, which I'm working on. In the meantime, I've whanged together a mostly-working widget.

Without further ado, here is the latest widget:

6.0.1 some minor bugfixes

6.0.0 removes the deprecated kids and accessories Woots, and switches back to parsing HTML rather than an API. Wootoffs aren't expected to work, but everything else should mostly be okay. Consider this an "early release" until a few things are sorted out.

5.2.3 corrects a graphic issue when Woot uses the full-sized image as the thumbnail

5.2.2 now understands that tech.woot.com has been split into electronics.woot.com and computers.woot.com.

5.2.1 adds accessories.woot.com.

N.B.: If the widget still shows the old version after upgrading, it's because the dock has cached the Javascript, which can be corrected by rebooting or restarting the dock from the command line with "killall Dock"

 

FAQ

Q: I would like to monitor more than one woot site at a time. How do I run more than one instance of the widget and point each to a different woot site?

A: To start another instance of any widget, open the dashboard, then on the lower left hand corner of the screen, there's a plus sign in a circle. Click that, and the widget bar should appear, with all the widgets you have installed. Scroll until you find the woot widget — and clicking on it will create another instance.

Each instance has independent settings, and the site to monitor is on a drop down called "Mode" on the back of the widget, where the settings are.

Q: How do I get Growl to work? How can I select Growl if it's greyed out?

A: When the dashboard first starts up, the widget loads and checks to see if Growl is installed and operational. If it isn't, Growl won't be available to the widget. So if Growl starts after the dashboard, the dashboard needs to be restarted if it's going to use Growl. This can be done from the command line, by typing "killall Dock" (note the capital D.)

Often when this occurs, it's because Growl, for some reason, isn't running. Best to check that first, then try reloading the widget (as above or with Command-R.)

Q: The widget isn't working! What do I do?

A: The most common reason isn't anything you've done wrong, but if it's blank or some of the text or images, then it's usually one of two things: Woot is broken, or Woot changed something. To figure out if woot is broken, just go to the appropriate woot site -- it's not unusual for their servers to experience heavy loads and break sometimes. There's not much the widget can do about this.

On the other hand, if woot changed something, this is usually noticed and an update is produced. On the back of the widget in the lower right hand corner, there's a version number. First, check to see if you have the latest by comparing it to the version above. (Note that the widget will check for updates automatically, and notify you using Growl, if you have that turned on.) If you already have the latest version, and it's not working, and woot is, email the address at the bottom of this page.

Note: OpenDNS users have reported sporadic problems retrieving images. If the widget is white or displaying "unk" in places, chances are, it's not actually resolving api.woot.com properly. Beats me why this would be, and I can't reproduce it here, but try "nslookup api.woot.com" and see what you get, as of 9/13/2011, this is what you should see:

Non-authoritative answer:
api.woot.com canonical name = ec2-75-101-217-155.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
Name: ec2-75-101-217-155.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Address: 75.101.217.155

If not, well, that's the problem.

Version History and Old Versions

I'm going to start removing links to old versions, mainly due to a few (and as far as I can tell, pointless) bots that download them regularly in their entirety. I don't think anybody will lose sleep over this; the version history will remain here.

5.2 is where Hal has added tools.woot.com and cleaned out some debris.

5.1.2 fixes a Growl issue where Growl would simply... not work ... sometimes, as outlined in this Growl bug report.

5.1.1 fixes the last issue ... better, as Woot changed things again, and also cleans up and corrects checking for updates. (Thank you again, Hal!)

5.1 fixes an issue where Woot percentages are now reported differently, giving the widget the impression that items were always "almost gone." It also adds tech.woot.com.

5.0 adds support for sport.woot.com, as well as some significant internal overhauls by Hal Hockersmith.

4.3.1 adds support for Growl 1.3+, for anybody who upgraded Growl through the App Store. Growl 1.2- will still work if you didn't.

4.3.0 adds home.woot.com. Thanks to Brad Ummer.

4.2.1 updates the URL invoked when clicking on the sellout.woot panel

4.2.0 fixes an issue with "sold out" detection.

4.1.9 fixes Woot-Off detection. Whew! See the flurry of updates below if you want to know what else has been fixed.

4.1.8 Woot's API/RSS feed appears to be behaving strangely. This update points to the redirected API, in the hopes that when Woot's end starts behaving, the widget will work as well.

4.1.6 is an update from Hal to fix the titles from the RSS feed

4.1.5 fixes a problem with sellout.woot and fixes an issue with the flip icons. (Thanks, Hal!) Also, the download link is fixed for future version updates.

4.1.3 fixes a problem where checking its own version would cause the widget to "stick" and display only a white screen

4.1.2 updates the widget to support Woot!'s new format

4.1.1 provides "woot-off" visuals for all woot sites.

4.1.0 adds support for the new "kids.woot". Many thanks to Hal Hockersmith for the bulk of the work.

4.0.0 changes a few key things: first, the RSS feed is used instead of the HTML screen, which should insulate the widget from future changes to the website. Second, a "woot-off" should be visible in the small version of the widget. Third, it changed the subtitle text back from the "teaser" text to the subtitle. Thanks to Hal Hockersmith for the update.

3.5.4 has been adapted to the radical changes at woot (note: woot-offs may not work; there hasn't been a woot-off since the changes.)

3.5.3 updates the woot-off percentage to accomodate a recent change

3.5.2 updates the widget to locate pictures in their new locations

3.5.1 updates parsing to handle multiple item pictures on a page, as happened on sellout.woot.com recently.

3.5.0 switches to asynchronous retrieval of woot -- which should alleviate the widget seeming to freeze or go blank when woot is slow or down

3.3.0 fixes an issue where woot changed a tag, and the widget showed a blank

3.2.9 cleans up some outdated logic and updates the way the shirt.woot image is displayed

3.2.8 fixes a problem with sellout.woot where the screen would be blank

3.2.7 corrects an obscure math error that affected its ability to determine if there's an update. So, this takes care of the nonsensical daily update notice.

3.2.6 We all knew this day would come; sellout.woot.com has been changed again. This version figures out how to cope with that.

3.2.5 if you've ever woken up in the middle of the night and thought "huh, that's something I'd better fix," then this might make sense to you. This version corrects a subtle bug regarding preferences and multiple instances of the widget. I'm not sure if anybody would ever want to run two versions of this same widget to monitor the same woot site, but if it ever comes up, this version makes such a thing behave as you would expect.

3.2.4 fixes two "almost gone" issues -- a notification problem and one ugly, ugly graphic.

3.2.3 is now available --

3.2.2 fixes some niggling issues:

3.2.1 is a minor update that simplifies and speeds up the retrieval of sellout.woot.com. It no longer appears necessary to poke Yahoo! Shopping to get it to behave itself.

3.2.0 adds two major upgrades:

Oho! Looks like Woot made some changes to how images are served. Version 3.1.4 should take care of that.

3.1.3 fixes a bug wherein preferences were not always retrieved properly

3.1.2 adds support for shirts.woot.com. It's really not my intention to generate new versions every few minutes, but I was working on it anyway, and at the end of the last woot-off, there it was -- a new woot site.

3.1.1 takes care of a weird little problem with showing item images with ampersands in them.

Occasionally, it would stop sending growl notifications, I believe that's fixed, too.

Probably the most striking thing is the new "woot off" visuals, which include a % remaining display.

3.0.9 should make it a little more resilient to changes on the Woot! site, and should therefore eliminate the blank widgets that people have been experiencing

3.0.8 has been significantly rewritten, to the extent that it doesn't resemble the original code much. Aside from the essentially invisible stuff like tightening up some of the code, this version adds a few significant features:

2.0.1 has been updated to support wine.woot.com as well. Rather than flip back and forth, I imagine people who care about both sites will simply use two instances of the widget.

1.2.7 is (most likely) the last release of the old branch; it's only slightly changed from the old code, but I got it working again after the woot site changed.

For comments, suggestions, questions, or other types of support, feel free to email me here.