Florida aside I have to admit that this week at the beach has been the warmest spring break that we’ve had in years! We’ve had the boat out, been to the beach, and swam the dogs just about everyday. I almost hate to head back to reality - though I’m well aware of what awaits!

The other day Jon and I got to talking about scripts, the GPL, and carrots. And I got to thinking about how many times my carrots had been used. So, I thought it would be neat to add a download counter - to track their use - to the page. I popped over to Hotscripts to get such a beast, but I didn't make out so well...

I got xtide up and running on the server last night, and now I have the command line version cronned to build a page showing me what I'm in for should I head to the beach. End state I'd like to get SMS tide updates every Friday afternoon, say, during the summer. No need here, just an interest in the moving body of water! Not for navigational purposes!

I modified (today) the Froogle Feed perl script that I developed for PHPShop - specifically for the Joanne Hudson Basics site. The biggest change to the logic, is that I no longer try to cull the HTML out of the records that get returned from the database. While the logic that was in place (reg exp) was working it was really tailored strictly to Jon's coding style - so it wasn't portable. I modified the job to use the perl HTML::Parser module which does a much better, and more efficient job of stripping the HTML code. There's still a little reg exp in the code - I use it to replace foreign accents - currently I'm only tackling e's and a's, but the pattern matching is straight forward and easily modifiable if anyone needs another letter.

The whole reason for even looking at the Froogle feed again was that I used it as a skeleton for a new Aggregator feed - Yahoo! Products. The Yahoo! Products concept is identical to Froogle, so it held that my program logic would be too. I actually like the Yahoo file format better then Froogle's, as you only have to deal with one layout and it can dynamically support multiple product types (eg. Housewares, Books, CDs, Videogames, etc.). Currently I'm maintaining two source trees, but it would probably make sense to merge the two programs into a single job. I'll think about that after Yahoo! blesses the file that I sent them today.

The new Froogle Feed Builder script is on the website now. I'll put the Yahoo! script up once it gets approved.

I was putting together a quick WAP script to calculate UPS rates, for Kloset Talk last night when I ran into difficulty. I pirated the logic for the script from what I put in the DealTime feed script, which in turn was stolen from my Froogle Feed script. The script appears to be working fine, but the values it's returning... Well, I can't find them on any of UPS' rate schedules. I'm using the Perl Business::UPS module, and it appears to be working fine as does the UPS cgi script that it calls. This doesn't affect the Froogle script, because it doesn't include shipping, but it does mean that the DealTime feed is wrong. I'll have to do some more investigation.

I got tons of emails, stating the obvious - the Froogle script doesn't send the file to Froogle. That's because we initially only sent the file intermittently. But, I modified the script and now it does the FTP automatically to Froogle once the file is built. The revised script, froogleFeed.pl, can be found in the same location spot as the previous version: www.dunc-it.com/carrot.php

Dunc

I put the PHPShop Froogle Feed Builder Perl script, that I developed for Joanne Hudson Basics, up on the website today. We've been running it for sometime at JHA and haven't had any issues with it. At this time we're only building the basic file format, which precludes us from listing any of our books... Here's the script: froogleFeed.pl. Enjoy.

Dunc