Thursday, April 12, 2007

Auto publishing listings to Trulia, Google Base, and Edgeio

I had set up xml based publishing feeds some time ago in order to submit listings from Remerica Somerset to Trulia and Google Base. While neither worked like magic, I recall having more trouble with the Google Base format (lots more) than Trulia. Trulia also automatically hits the address that you give them periodically to refresh your listings. Google on the other hand, makes you load a file from your desktop (as far as I can tell) and then expires all you listings and forces you to manulally reload them every 30 or 45 days or something like that. So, needless to say, I like the way Trulia is set up better.

Anyway, I digress from what spurred me to this article. I was surfing around Edgeio the other day and realized, or remembered, that at one time I had worked on feeding listings to that site also, I believe using rss, but I recalled that the info was spartan with basic rss. It looks like what they have now allows for more data, so I set up a listing feed and tryed to load it. The two main errors that I get that I don't understand are

[error #104.010] error: Published time of the listing was not defined
[error #110.212] error: Unable to determine listing's location

I used the tag and followed the RFC2822 format by using the date('r') fnction from PHP, but it still doesn't like it. I'm not sure what it wants for location, as I followed the category tags for city, state, country, and zip that they specified.

What really surprized me about Edgeio though, was that I could find no way to contact them on the site in order to get assistance with the problem. There appeared to be administrators, but their email was hidden. So I guess for now I'm stuck in my quest to add listings to Edgeio

3 comments:

V H said...

Dave,

For future reference, the feedback form is here:
http://www.edgeio.com/feedback?cat=other

It is linked from our Wiki, which again is linked from the bottom of the site, but I must admit it took me a minute or so to find the link for me too - I'll mention that to the right person.

As for the formatting of your feed, it looks right from a casual glance. I'll make sure someone looks into it for you.

V H said...

Dave,

It's actually not your feed that's the problem. The problem you're running into is related to feed autodiscovery in our system - it's a bit too smart for it's own good and find your generic RSS feed and pick that over the one you provided.

We're about to rip out that functionality exactly because it causes problems like the one you ran into. In the meantime I have manually updated our system to pull in the correct feed from you - they should appear soon.

Regards,
Vidar Hokstad - Edgeio

Unknown said...

Thanks Vidar, thats awesome!