You are now able to view your Squirt^TM Alerts from any computer or mobile device that’s capable of viewing RSS.  To access your list of alerts all you need to do is visit http://www.lemonfree.com/rss/user_alerts.php?hint=dkaravas@lemonfree.com. Just change my email address “dkaravas@lemonfree.com” to yours.

To be honest I’ve never used an RSS reader until now. I just didn’t see what the fuss was about but we thought that being able to syndicate Squirt^TM Alerts and lists of Alerts would be useful so we loaded this up into our product backlog and there you have it.

To test this out I had first tried it in Firefox. Subscribing to my alert feed was a simple click of a button. This worked so well I wondered what it would look like on my iPhone. Low and behold it actually works out very nicely on the iPhone. I get why people like using RSS readers now. It’s really quite handy!

The key benefit here is that if you have an alert setup for your work email address (as many people seem to have) you’ll be able to access those same alerts from your home computer without having to setup the same alerts again. Plus it’s really easy to share your Alert lists now; just email them to your friends, post them on Squidoo, or integrate them into your blog.

Demetri

We’re looking for experienced webmasters to help us Beta Test the new Lemonfree.com API. We think we’ve managed to iron out most of the glitches but we’ll need help in finding the ones we’ve missed.

This is new for us and we’re not quite sure what to expect. We’ve built a quick and dirty API Demo site that leverages our API to demonstrate a little of what you can do with it and learned a little of what we need to successfully launch.

There’s also a challenge, unofficially, put forth by Mashery – to be fair, the Mashery rep didn’t actually throw down the gauntlet. They don’t think we’ll be able to successfully launch and run our API without someone in the middle caching and load balancing the traffic for us. I stubbornly think the team here at lemonfree.com is capable of doing this for considerably less than the cost of outsourcing, granted without the frills.

Can you generate enough traffic to cause our server pain? Will you humble us and our infrastructure? This is our challenge to you.

What can you do with the Lemonfree.com API? You can query it for vehicles for sale in the USA and Canada. You can query our 1.7 million vehicle database by any combination of make, model, year, price, milage and zip code.

If you’re interested in participating in the beta test please email me with some information about your website, how much traffic you think you’ll generate, and what sort of monster mash-up you’ll be creating.

Kevin over at “The Money Hawk” blog has written an excellent blog post on how to go about selling your car. If your try to sell a car on LemonFree.com, please check out this post before you do, a few minutes might just save you a few hundred or thousand dollars.

Here are some of the topics discussed within the post:

• Research the Kelly Blue Book (KBB) Value and outstanding loan balance.
• Figure out if it’s within your means.
• Prepare & market the car.
• Prepare a Bill of Sale & accept payment.
• Pay off the car note, acquire title, and mail title.

Good luck with your sale and don’t forget to list your car on LemonFree.com once you’ve read the article.

Cheers,
Dan & The LemonFree Team

Here at LemonFree we are always trying to find ways to get more information to our users, whether its Gas Mileage, Safety Ratings, Dealer Ratings etc…

Occasionally we find a great article or resource on the internet that we must share with our users because we think its such a great source of information.

We happen to come across a great article / blog post on BibleMoney Matters that really has some great tips for consumers when buying a used car. Here are some of the topics the article talks about.

• Use the power of the internet
• Used cars have a history
• Check for signs of tell-tale vehicle damage
• Make sure to take a vehicle for a test drive
• Pay for a vehicle inspection by your mechanic
• Don’t play the “monthly payment game”
• And Much More…

Click on the link below to read the article.
Time to take the plunge and get a new car
Cheers,
Dan & The LemonFree Team

LemonFree.com has started posting the 2009 car & truck reviews online. Below is a list of the reviews we’ve already got online. If your looking to purchase a new car and are waiting for the new 2009 models, check our reviews out.

2009 Acura TSX Review
2009 Jaguar XF Review
2009 Subaru Forester Review
2009 Hyundai Sonata Review
2009 Pontiac Vibe Review
2009 Infiniti FX Review
2009 Mercedes-Benz SL-Class Review
2009 Nissan Maxima Review
2009 Nissan Murano Review
2009 Toyota Corolla Review
2009 Toyota Matrix Review
2009 Honda Pilot Review
2009 Volkswagen Tiguan Review

More to come in the next few weeks.

Cheers,
Dan & The LemonFree Team

The bug was first planted in my ear when speaking with someone at Zend. Their claim was with the Zend Platform PHP scripts would execute 1 to 10 times faster. Plus the Zend Platform would compress data sent to the browser, monitor MySQL, and mange downloads.

At first the two things that appealed to me the most was the MySQL monitoring and the compressing of data being sent to the browser. For less money we ended up getting a license from MySQL that also provides support which is simply worth every penny. Doing a little research on the web took me to a great paper on , optimizing page load times.

What I learned from die.net was that I didn’t need any fancy software to do what Apache already had built in. There were some pretty common sense things to do, like having browsers cache images and javascript, compressing data sent to the browser, keepalives, etc.

After implementing many of these suggestions there was a noticeable improvement in performance. At least that was the perception when surfing lemonfree.com from my sister in-law’s dial-up connection in rural Saskatchewan. I was so happy with the results, that were evident from observation, that I hadn’t thought about caching PHP opcode or running benchmarks for a very long time.

One thing that really stuck with me from my research was that IBM recommended running eAccelerator in one of their papers about optimizing Apache and PHP. I figured that it was worth looking at if IBM recommended it. On top of that, techs at our hosting company had on occasion recommended using eAccelertor or the Alternative PHP Cache (APC).

I had installed APC on one server and eAccelertor on another server and really couldn’t tell if there was any benefit. I recall saying to a co-worker that lemonfree may or may not be any faster. I didn’t think it was slower. Since it was not obvious I decided to measure actual load times. Die.net came to the rescue here with a peice of Java code that measures the actual load times your users experience and records it in your apache logs. The code is as follows:

<head>
<title>...</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var began_loading = (new Date()).getTime();

function done_loading() {
 (new Image()).src = '/timer.gif?u=' + self.location + '&t=' +
  (((new Date()).getTime() - began_loading) / 1000);
}
// -->
</script>
<!--
Reference any external javascript or stylesheets after the above block.
// -->
</head>
<body onload="done_loading()">
<!--
Put your normal page content here.
// -->
</body>
</html>

Now that I had a way to measure load times I ran three tests on a partner site, classifieds.carforums.net. I picked the partner site as there isn’t a large amount of Java Script or images to be displayed when compared to lemonfree.com. I figured that it should be easy to see the benefits on a simpler site.

The three tests were without caching, using eAccelortor, and finally using APC. I ran the tests for about a day each, the results are in the table below.

Caching really had no impact on our partner site. What I liked about APC is that it gives you pretty graphs and tells you things like you’re hitting cached code 99.9% of the time but when you look at the actual page load times there really isn’t a benefit to caching PHP opcode with respect to page load times. Maybe on a less powerful server it would make a difference but on our partner site the bottle neck is certainly not the overhead from compiling PHP script.

I’ll be running a more in depth test on Lemonfree.com. We’re including page load times into our company targets and any change we make will also have the page load times factored in. I plan on running the tests for at least a week at a time on lemonfree.com and I’ll now in a month if caching is worth it on Lemonfree.

Demetri

Yesterday we added a body search option to LemonFree.com. LemonFree users now have the option to search for a vehicle by SUV, 4 Door, Truck, 2 Door, Minivan, Wagon, Convertible, Hatchback, Van or Hybrid.

We haven’t yet added this new option to our squirt alert menu or our advanced search, this will be coming within the next few weeks.

If you have any problem using the new body search please let us know. We’ve tested it internally to make sure it works, but it always seems that no matter how much we’ve tested a product it never seems to be flawless the first time.

Email dlegal@lemonfree.com with your comments, questions or concerns.

Cheers,
Dan & The LemonFree Team

Question:
Hello ,I need to now a few things and would be very greatful for your help .If I was to purchase a car from the usa from ontario what are the extra expenses I have to pay to get it here eg taxes duties etc.Aswell Is it possible to get a loan for a car that isfrom the usa???

Answer:
It depends on the car as to what the expense would be. A friend of mine picked up a car from New Jersey last year and I think he was out of pocket around $2,000 in air fair, gas, and fees. He claims he saved a few thousand dollars on his Volvo. Our office admin also picked up a Honda from the US last year and she’s very happy with the money that she saved.

If the car is covered under NAFTA then you’ll only pay GST and I think $200 to have it registered with the Registrar of Imported Vehicles plus an excise tax if it has air conditioning of around $100.00.

If the car isn’t covered under NAFTA ( say a 2008 Audi R8 ) then you’ll pay duty of around 6.5% on top of the price plus GST.

I’m not sure if you’ll have to pay PST in Ontario. In Manitoba we have to pay 7% PST on all vehicles (private sale or not) based on the book value of the car when we insure them.

There’s more information on importing a car into Canada at http://lemonfree.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/importing-a-us-car-into-canada

Getting a loan on a vehicle outside of Canada depends on your credit and your bank. You’ll have to ask them. As long as your credit is good I can’t see them not giving you a personal loan.

I don’t recommend buying or giving a deposit on a vehicle that you haven’t seen. There are a lot of scam artists out there and there will always be another deal to be found if you let one slip past you.

One thing you can do if you’re really set on having a particular vehicle is look in the yellow pages of the city that the vehicle is in and hire an auto appraiser to go and take a look at it. At least you’ll save yourself the cost of flying down to look at a vehicle that may not be worth it.

Hope this helps.

Demetri Karavas
Lemonfree.com

Every single listing that now gets listed on LemonFree via our feed partners or via our listing page now has the option to also be listed on autos.aol.com for…… you guessed it, Free!!  That’s right, every one of our listings is now featured on autos.aol.com.

We invite everyone to come and list there automobiles with us, private sellers, dealers… everyone!!

Dealers, if you want to learn how you can get your auto listings on LemonFree for free, click here now.

If you haven’t tried LemonFree.com, please give it a try; we’re sure you’ll like it. If you don’t agree with us make sure you send your comments and suggestions to me dlegal@lemonfree.com. Please tell me why you did or didn’t like the site.

Cheers,
Dan
dlegal@lemonfree.com

As fast passed a company as we are, it took us quite a while to finally get a LemonFree profile page up on Facebook.

If your a facebook user and would like to show your appreciation for LemonFree.com, go to the LemonFree profile page on Facebook and click on the link “become a fan”.

If you have comments or questions about the site you can also leave us a note on the discussion board.

Cheers,
Dan & The LemonFree Team