WA fuel prices end of year report

Here we are approaching the end of 2008, and quite a year it's been. The price of unleaded fuel has fallen drastically to levels we've not seen in many years; a quick scan of one of the earlier WA Fuel Finder databases is showing the average price of unleaded fuel at 125.0 cents/litre (September 21, 2006) and the cheapest fuel that day was 113.4 cents/litre sold at three locations by the Caltex Woolworths brand of petrol stations in Karrinyup, Maddington West, and Maddington Centro Shopping Centre.

In 2008 we started the year with an average of 144.9 cents/litre on Jan 9*, recording its highest point of 166.2 cents/litre on July 13. Since October 17 when the day's average was 155.2 cents/litre, prices have fallen every day since then, affected mostly by the global economic downturn.

The current average price of unleaded fuel in Western Australia (December 11, 2008) is 110.5 cents/litre, the cheapest fuel is being sold for 98.5 cents/litre at United Quinns Rock. It certainly has been a long time since unleaded fuel costs less than a dollar per litre, that mark was passed long before WA Fuel Finder began tracking fuel prices, and we might have some ways to go just yet.

So with that in mind I would like to say thanks to all the visitors over the entire 2008, and wish you all well for this holiday season and the coming year. I will be taking a short break from overseeing the site operations and have made arrangements with a friend to help maintain the site for the rest of December 2008. There may be minor disruptions or slight delays in getting following-day's prices up on the site but rest assured we'll be back to full speed from January 2009 (we still have quite a few things planned for in the WA Fuel Finder roadmap).

Drive safe and happy holidays!


*due to minor data collection issues that is the earliest complete price date I have for the year

October app updates and upgrades

Some of you might be familiar with the occasional site downtime and timeouts over the last few months, well rest assured they've not gone unnoticed. Migration has been in the books all along, unfortunately due to various scheduling constraints I'm only able to do so now (apologies). Nonetheless we'll be transitioning the site over to the new host starting right now and should be completed within the next few days. While the nameservers worldwide gets settled on the new location for wafuelfinder.com, we've taken precautions to make sure the hand-over go as smooth as possible, however if you notice something weird then please bear with us while it sorts itself out.

On another note, the app itself had a few noticeable updates, one of which is the iPhone/iPod Touch-optimized version of the site. Being an iPhone webapp there is no need to install anything, just point your iPhone/iPod Touch Safari browsers over to wafuelfinder.com/i and tap away. Some handy features include auto-completion of the location names and remembering your last search location, it even comes with a shiny new application icon so you won't be ashamed to add it to your home screen.

We kept things small so as not to use up too much of your valuable bandwidth. For a more complete list of features click here. Bear in mind that if you're trying out the touch-optimized app (or the main site for that matter) during the migration period, you might still be served the application from the old host and there might be some performance issues. Not to worry, check back after the migration is complete to make sure you're being served the app from the new host, it's a much more enjoyable experience I promise.

And lastly, the map type switcher buttons have been removed from the map and are now tabs on the tab bar directly above it. This should declutter the display somewhat and give you a better view of what's going on in the map.



So that's all for now, enjoy. I will update this post if there are any interesting bits of news during the migration.

Drive safe

Update 3/10/08: All done (actually migration looked done a few days ago but I thought I'd wait until the old host stops getting request before calling it a day). Enjoy

List view of cheapest prices for 'any' area

A few minor changes in this release however the most notable change you might notice is the new tabs for search results. When you search for prices in a location you're used to getting an ordered list of prices from the search area. Now not only can get the same ordered list for the location, but you can also use the 1 'Prices in the area' tab to get an ordered list from the active map. Browse the map while the 'Prices in the area' tab is active you'll get ordered prices as found from the area on map.

2 Toggling between the freeze/unfreeze controls whether the list updates as you pan/zoom the map or remain frozen.

All in all this should make it a little bit easier to get a quick glance of cheapest fuel prices in an area without having to click on individual stations on the map or running a succession of searches.

I'm always eager to hear from fellow finders so if you have any comment or suggestion please send me a note from the feedback form.

Drive safe :)

Happy Holidays to all and to all a G'day

It's that time of the year again to wish a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2008 to all. I will be taking a short break from running the site until January 11, 2008. In the meantime I've arranged for a friend to take over some of the responsibilities in maintaining the site and keeping the fuel price data as accurate as possible. Following day's fuel prices might take a little longer to show up on the site but *hopefully* everything else will be running as smooth as possible.

Drive safe and happy holidays, WA Fuel Finder will back stronger in 2008 :)

Update 9/1/08: OK that didn't turn out as planned, sorry for the missing data over the Christmas and New Year holiday, I'm working on getting some fresh data for 9/1 onwards, should be done in a few minutes. Stay tuned

Update 2: All done :)

Site downtime

Earlier today the WA Fuel Finder had an unexpected outage. Unfortunately visitors may have been greeted with the oops page from approximately 2:30PM Perth time. This was due to a possible server hardware failure and the system admins at the hosting company scrambled to remedy the problem and had sorted everything out by 8:30PM. Although the blog remained online all this time, due to the nature of the failure I wasn't able to publish a post during the maintenance period.

My apologies for any inconvenience, even more so during this long weekend. I'll be monitoring the site for any other problems, if you'd like to report any issues or have any suggestions please send me a note from the feedback form.

Drive save and have a good break :)

The story so far and a little on updates

A little over a year ago WA Fuel Finder started off as a hobby of a task of combining FuelWatch's data feeds and Google's Australian street maps to build just the kind of fuel price checker I could use with little thought.

For over a year this site has proven a neat timesaver for me and hopefully for you as well. Unfortunately it hasn't always been without its issues; some of which is addressed with this release, plus a few updates added for good measure. So what's new?

Going green with Biodiesel
You can now specifically search for Biodiesel fuel prices through the site. At the time of this post there are 32 stations selling Biodiesel fuel so you might want to zoom out to find stations selling Biodiesel in WA. They produce lower emissions and average round 4-5c cheaper than diesel and runs in any conventional/unmodified diesel engine. For more info check out fifteen important facts about Biodiesel.

Wider support for suburb searches, zippier too
Searching for suburbs which doesn't hold any stations now yields an ordered list of fuel prices AND the corresponding petrol stations map within a ~5km range of the location. Try it: search for Unleaded petrol in Peppermint Grove and find ordered prices in nearby stations within ~5km away in Cottesloe, Mosman Park etc.

Taming the Internet Explorer 7 beast
IE7 users can say goodbye to extraordinarily large info bubbles upon clicking map markers. WA Fuel Finder recommends viewing on browsers with good support for web standards such as Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari (both Mac & PC versions). But just in case, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 is supported too.

Ever wondered what happens when you save a map location?
This is a feature I personally use frequently to save time searching individual suburbs to find ordered prices around a custom area. Custom locations are stored in your browser cookie (not on the server) and anytime you visit the home page you will automatically be shown prices within that location. You can easily delete the location cookie from your browser by clicking on the 'x' on the shortcut at the top of the site (only shown if you have a saved location).

A crash course for newcomers
First time visitors to wafuelfinder.com need not be confused as to what to do on the site now that there's a short pictorial introduction on the home page. I never got around to doing this before so it's more for completeness sake :)

What's in the pipeline
There's a few more ideas in the pipeline for WA Fuel Finder *cough* widgets *cough* which I can't say too much about right now. But keep an eye on this space and be the first to know when new features are released.

So there it is, hopefully things are zippier now. If there's anything missed please leave a comment or submit a feedback.

Happy finding and drive safe.

Whoops, where did all the stations go?

Unfortunately due to a minor glitch there were no fuel prices available for Sunday May 6, 2007 although Saturday and Monday was fine. So for the better part of the day you might not see any results for your search nor stations on the map. Not to worry the fix is on the way and it should be up in a few seconds.

Update 5:33pm: Sunday's prices are now up ;)