Hi Ian

I don't know if you recall, but we never did get the automatic ftp upload function to work with my hosting provider. However now google has a new 'scheduled upload' feature - which is probably a better way of working anyway.

I think I have had success pointing the scheduler to http://sitename.com/mambots/system/vmrss_v4/all_products.xml

Is there a way to prevent the mabot from trying to ftp upload, while continuing to create a fresh all_products XML file say, weekly?

thanks

Chris

Hi I do recall yes
And that schedule upload was how everybody expected Google to work from the first moment it was announced it was to be released!!!!

But they went with some crazy FTP idea instead.

The Froogle Feed V3 is designed for this exact method, where it produces an XML on a module, and you can write click "Copy shortcut" then paste that in the schedule, so Google visits this URL and collects the data.

Other shopping systems such as shopping.com and price runner work in this way, so everybody assumed this is how it would work here as well.

When it didn't, we had to then build V4 to have an auto upload feature.

You can see the V3 working to the right of this forum, just click on a link, and it will show you that feed

This could be the answer to a lot of queries, i have set one up on my Google account, to see if this works, ill let everybody know as soon as i know.

Regards
Ian

HI Ian

Thanks for the reply. If I remember v3 correctly it didn't publish discounted prices on my items...? Am I correct?

I set up google to retrieve the XML file automatically, but now I'm wrestling with my robots.txt file to make sure it can access the XML file without accessing all the other mambots folder. Is there a way to have your script dump the xml file in a 'google-accessible' folder?

thanks

Chris

Hi chris
i forgot about that mate
If you point Google as you said above to http://www.yoursite.com/mambots/system/vmrss_v4/all_products.xml
It should work in theory perfect

Nope, it reports
"Our attempt to download your data feed was denied by your site's robots.txt file".

I tried specifically "allow"ing the file in robots.txt, but it was still blocked by the disallow of the Mambots folder.
Trying again with the whole mambots folder open to google. If that works, I'll exclude the subfolders one by one I guess.

Is there a way to set v4 so that it generates the feed say, weekly, but doesn't try to ftp it anywhere?

thanks

chris

Hi Chris, I'm looking into it generation it without FTPing, but as the FTP system is well and truly wrapped in to it, im not sure how hard this is going to be, as about 90% of the code will need changing.

The robots TXT, I personally dont think the Mambots folder need excluding to be honest. The spider will only visit links and pages that are linked from other pages, and i dont think there are any links to anything in there. Ill see if i can also modify it to export the XML into a root folder, this may correct this issue.

I have to say though at the moment, i have major amounts of work on, we are launching a new system as i type, developing a secret new Froogle system that will be launched in 2 months time, and i have 4 clients websites to go live by the end of this week. So i probably cant do this straight away.

Regards
Ian