Universal Feed Reader Script - Would you be interested?

[dmorison]

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For almost 12 months now i've operated a web service providing an easy way for anyone without programming knowledge to make use of affiliate datafeeds.

At the heart of the software is a universal feed parser script (written in PHP) that can make sense of almost anything you can throw at it. It will read RSS, Atom, any plain text file format, and virtually any custom dialect of XML. It is resiliant to all the common formatting errors found in affiliate datafeeds (unescaped quotes in CSV files, HTML in XML files without CDATA delimitation etc.)

What i'm interested to know is whether there are affiliates here that have tried to use PHP and (perhaps) MySQL to build their own datafeed powered sites (perhaps you wanted to have a go at a price comparison site) but given up because of all the "gotchas" involved in handling all the different feed formats and the plethora of formatting errors found in affiliate datafeeds.

If I were to package the script up for download rather than use as a web service, implementation would be something along the lines of:

require("FeedReader.php");

function recordHandler($record)
{
  // this function is called for each record in the feed
  // $record is an associative array
}

// register your custom record handler function
FeedReaderInit("recordHandler");

// read the feed (can be anything you would pass to fopen())
FeedReaderRead("/path/to/file"); 

What do you think? Would anybody be interested?

Thanks for your comments!

[Keith]

yes this is something I may be interested in

[pricethat]

Theres a few people here that will be interested but what you offer isnt anything that we havent developed for ourselves over about 2 years. I would be interested to see how you have done it and what it does but i have offered a few things to the forum in the past just to help and the amount of feed back is low.

Dont expect to make any money out of it, the ones that really really really wanted to do a price comparison site have done have got past these issues and moved on.

I would love to see what you did and would always recommend anything to people that ask me, i just thought you should brace yourself for maybe only a dozen takers really. (certainly from the forum anyway)

good luck anyway

[jasonflk]

I might be intrested too.

[renegade]

It's a me too here. We're in the process of working past the gotchas and if you've already done the work we'd love to see how you've solved the problems.

[Black Cat]

I'd be interested too!

[eskimo]

I would be interested. Feeds have been on my todo list, though some of the posts I've read about the various pitfalls, makes me slightly daunted about the whole thing.

[MarkyB]

Yep, Would be interested here too!

Cheers,
Mark.

[kevquinlan]

I am interested in a working price comparison type script that i can use with AW Product feeds

Am willing to pay if it works - send me details / examples etc

Many thanks

Kev

[pricethat]

Kevquinlan,

Its a feed parser, not a comparison site script, it just imports data to a database!

[Elaine]

Yep I'd be interested - especially if it's easy to use with little or no previous knowledge of php and mysqul

[JimboJetSet]

Hey dmorison, its very kind of you to offer technology. If you offer it for free then I'd be very interested as it would save me time producing one of my own.

I'm still writing my first affiliate marketing website and its in php5 & mysql5 as well. The stage I'm at right now is writing the php code to pull news articles out of the db for your info.

If you'd like to make money from it then why not put this and all your other useful scripts on a new website all about how to technically write an affiliate marketing website that uses data feeds. With some ads down the side you can make money from it that way right?

Prolly been done before no doubt but maybe you could customize your site to UK affiliate marketers maybe or just make it more user friendly than the other ones.