OK, I’ve been getting quite a few emails about the (non-) existence of Craftweasel, so here it is.  To cut a long story short, I have been too busy with other projects to maintain it.  Also, for boring technical reasons, it’s quite expensive to host (it requires Java servelet hosting, which is still not something that the internet is good at doing cheaply!).

So I’m making the source code available here in the hope that someone else will pick it up and run with it.  If you do, let me know and I’ll stick a link in here.

Click here to download Craftweasel

I have been making some improvements to my Tomcat setup for hosting Grails apps, but unfortunately this has broken things for Craftweasel. I’ve been planning on migrating Craftweasel to Grails for some time, which should get things running again. It might be a while until I can get round to it thought, because the day job is keeping me busy! Alternatively, I’m more than happy to open-source the code if any of my readers would like to have a go!

Craftweasel.com, my collection of tools for etsy sellers, is featured in this very detailed write-up on Going Home To Roost. The article talks about a few different ways to use the craftweasel tools for market research – it might be useful reading if you’re looking for ideas on how to use the tools.

My Tag Finder tool, which lets Etsy sellers find tags for their items, has been featured on the Transcapitalist blog.  The article is an interesting take on how the developers who use the Etsy API (myself included) are largely drawn from the ranks of people who have used Etsy as sellers.  I think this is probably just a specific case of the more general rule that independent software developers tend have success in domains which they know well.

It looks like craftweasel has been featured in the Etsy Success email – welcome to all our new readers and users!

We know that Etsyians love their holidays, so with a month to go, what are we all making? If we put the tag halloween into the Tag Finder we can take a look.

Tags are in bold. Numbers in parentheses are the number of items from the first 1100 results for Halloween that also had the tag in question.

• All the usual categories are represented – accessories (220), jewellery (216), art (201) and clothing (96)
• Etsy sellers are making both costumes (157) and decorations (141)
• Many common symbols of halloween are being made, including skulls (108), witches (76), skeletons (73), pumpkins (72) and cats (64)
• The items have a big range of average prices from $154 for sculptures (20) to $3 for stationary (10)
• The traditional halloween colours of black (112) and orange (75) are represented far more often than red (49), blue (22), green (30) or white (26)

Maybe I’ll do this search again in a month’s time and see if the results are different.

Very exciting news – craftweasel is featured on the Etsy blog!