Stupid Datafeed Mistake You Shouldn’t Make
I made a really stupid mistake with one of my datafeed sites that i’d like to share with you in hopes that you don’t make the same mistake.
I’m using wordpress for the site and downloaded the datafeed from Shareasale. The datafeed has about 2,000 records in it. When I made the site I cleaned up the file, got rid of columns I didn’t need and then went ahead and used a datafeed importer to set the site up. The mistake I made was that I used the image URL’s supplied in the datafeed. Recently I went to the site and noticed there were no pictures. After some investigation I realized that the merchant changed all of their URLs which broke all of my images. Unfortunately, I can’t think of an easy way to fix this but a lesson learned is that I should actually figure out a way to host all of the images locally so that a change to their URLs doesn’t screw up my entire site.
I may just add a button to each of the posts saying click here for pictures. That should garner more clicks to the affiliate links and solve the issue of the listings not having any pictures.
Take a mental note and don’t make this mistake yourself.
I would correct the URL’s in excel then format the file so that WordPress will accept it for import and check the box (Download all images and media) it will then host all the images on your server so you don’t have this problem.
Same exact thing happened to me. I impoted the urls to a custom field called images. Not sure how to take those and upload them all to my server though.
Gotta love learning from others’ mistakes! How is the Datafeed site going? You haven’t updated us on it lately.
We have a few hundred thousand datafeed sites and we just have a central cache repository for every merchant.
First time the image is pulled from the merchant is the only time.
Serves a hell of a lot quicker as well
What importer did you use?
thx
@Carl – Review plugin for wordpress.
@Earl Grey – I’m definitely no datafeed site expert. Your system sounds really nice. If I continue doing these types of sites which I think I will I will look into a more sophisticated system.
Not sure how much of a database guy you are but you could import the new file into a table. Then write a query to update the image field of the old table when the product id matches with the info in new table.
So when oldtable.teabaggers_id = newtable.teabaggers_id update img_src.
I have a datafeed site I made using Joomla, its easy to upload products. I just need help with traffic. Check it out http://www.ebikerz.com I need some feedback.
Hey Hustler, you should try WPRS as it downloads the images locally from the datafeed and I think there will no issues even if the merchant changes the image path. I am still not sure about this though.
@Red_Virus – I was using reviewpluginforwordpress
@AdHustler, use the W3 Total Cache plug-in (it’s open source). It has a function that combs your posts, grabs all the image and media links, downloads them into your server, puts them into WordPress’ media library, then localizes the links inside the posts and writes the posts back to the database. Pretty freaking amazing, considering that’s not even a “real” feature, just a function you can use to get to the real feature: Uploading everything to a Content Distribution Network like Akamai.
I did a little how-to two weeks ago: http://negbox.com/how-to-accelerate-your-site-to-warp-factor-9-9-without-paying-99-a-month
@Slave Rat – Very smart – thanks for the tip. I will try it out for sure.