.csv files

How do they work

[Jegranet]

I am fairly new to site building, but know what I want to achieve. I want to deep link to my merchants products and some of them have product feed facilities. How is this done. I have loads of .csv files but have yet to find out how to use them. Can anyone help.

Many thanks.

Jegranet

[hannamyluv]

Are you looking to use the feeds to build pages or links? Either way, it's normally done with programming, PHP, Perl, Python are just a few.

You would use the programming to parse the feeds and then take the parts you need to build what you want, pages or links.

If you want to take a more elementary approach, you can open the CSV file in excel and do a Text to Columns with a comma. That puts it in your everyday spreadsheet form that you can hand pick links out of.

[Jegranet]

Hi, thanks for responding. It all sounds a bit technical. I want to provide a product search facility so that my users can enter a product name and the link take them directly to it on the merchant site.

Am I being too optimistic?

[hannamyluv]

For that you would need programming. Sometimes, someone will already have written a program to do what you want, but it is still helpful to know a little bit.

Actually, if you are an affiliate, you might find it well worth them time to learn some basic programming. You will find it can do all sorts of things to help you out, whether you are using a free script or writing your own.

[Jegranet]

Thanks hannamyluv

I am learning html at the moment, but using Front Page wysiwyg when I get into difficulty. I will plod on for now without the datafeeds. Maybe someone will take pity on me and sit down with me one day and talk me through it.

Thanks again.

Jegranet

[hannamyluv]

I know there are a few purists here, but I would tell you to just go ahead and use your Frontpage to do your design. Learning HTML is a nessesary thing, but hand-coding, for the most part, especially when you are just getting into this, is WAY too time consuming. Build your page in FP, and then after the page is done, look at the code and de-construct it. You will learn faster and waste less time.

Also, don't forget to peek at other site's source codes. If you see a site you like, take a look at the source and see what they did, or better yet, copy the source into FP, so that you can de-construct it as well and learn a few new things.