Ok, after a few months of work building a site that can take any datafeed and add it’s product to the DB, I finally launched Need 4 Deals this week.

The site launched with 10 merchants and over 15,000 products.

I’ve still got more to add to it before I’m done.

On another note, I’ve set up a few of my sites to do tracking via google’s new analytics site. So far, the reports back have been pretty useful and interesting.

Today, we officially launched Need 4 Deals.

This site is the end result of months of work with various merchants to create a site that can serve as a massive datafeed resource.

As of launch, the site has: 10 Merchants Listed with 15,749 Products Listed and more getting added each day.

Ok, I made a few more tweaks to this design over the past week to get it just the way I like it. That is now done.

Spent some time on a few various projects over the weekend. Did some more work on the new cooking site, and started working on my new mac site.

I’ve partnered with a colo facility in the states to sell colo space geared towards macs. Should be an interesting project there.

DevShed.com has just published another article written by me.

It’s called “Building a Simple Affiliate Systems In PHP / MySQL”

A quick overview of the article as if the name doesn’t say it all is this:

“Setting up an affiliate system on your website can be very lucrative. While there are a lot of details involved, it need not be overly complicated. This article walks you through the steps of creating and setting up a basic affiliate system”

View it here: on DevShed.com

Yesterday I mentioned about doing some sort of web services client / server type thing for OverStock.com datafeed sites.

I set up a subdomain to contain the database stuff and from there I set up an XML-RPC server to read the DB and forward it to the client per request.

The system works nicely. Just been doing testing so far, next step is to set up some actual sites that use the system.

It’s set up in a way that means that I could technically use the site as a gateway between overstock affiliates and myself if I wanted to. Hmmm, might be worth considering down the road since I don’t store the affiliate IDs on the server side, only on the client side.

Wonder if that is against their regulations to have an XML-RPC gateway set up and sell access to it to other affiliates?

Ok, time to shut my mouth with these ideas.

Been playing for sometime with the idea of redoing the template I had on this site. Finally decided tonight to do it.

It has a combination of various templates available for wordpress, complete with my own touches.

i like it. Works a little better than the previous template which was a regular wordpress template.

So, I set up a site testing OverStock.com’s affiliate feeds. First I wanted to try their XML interface, but it wasn’t as good as I wanted it, so instead I opted for the datafeed system. Their datafeed system involves setting up a lot of tables, almost a seperate table for each category to handle the various different fields.

That is working well and downloading new updates on an hourly basis. Each hour, it grabs a new set of data for one category, then the next hour, it grabs another set. Once a day, it unzips all the zip files and uploads them to the database, then deletes the downloaded files.

This can obviously get heavy if you have multiple sites doing this, so I think I will be setting up some sort of a web services interface so that I can have a client script talk to a central server script and serve products to my other planned OverStock affiliate sites that way. Much cleaner, much simpler.

Aside from that, the new cooking site is coming along nicely. It’s a modified version of my CMS as I said before, so the modifications are continuing. Gonna set it up so that people can rate articles, etc.

So, as of this weekend, all the links pages on all of my sites get their links from the same place.

Thanks to that web services system, I only have to update one list of links in one area, and all the links update on every site.

I like it, keeps it nice and simple.