Grouper Tips

Multi-affiliates search page example using CaRP and Grouper

Antone Roundy — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 10:52:00 -0600

I've posted an Affiliates RSS Example showing how CaRP and Grouper can be used to create a search page for multiple affiliates programs. A few noteworthy notes:

1) The affiliate search results are displayed on your website so that if your visitor doesn't find anything interesting, they're still on your site.

2) Multiple merchant sites can be searched from the same page, increasing the probability of your visitors finding something they're interested in. At the moment, the example code only sear...

Grouper 1.5 adds Amazon, Shopping.com and All Posters affiliates XML handling

Antone Roundy — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 20:40:00 -0600

Grouper version 1.5 was released today, adding new XML helper plugins for converting the XML from the Amazon.com, Shopping.com and All Posters affiliate marketing programs to RSS feeds. The new version also changes the way Grouper handles Google News and Yahoo! News, accessing the RSS feeds published by those services directly, now that they're publishing in RSS, instead of scraping the HTML search results. Finally, Feedster and Daypop support were moved from Grouper Evolution into the free v...

Grouper 1.4.3 adds Atom 1.0 support

Antone Roundy — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:44:00 -0600

Grouper version 1.4.3 was released today, adding the ability to convert Atom 1.0 feeds to RSS. The Atom 1.0 format specification is essentially a few bureaucratic steps from getting the official IETF stamp of approval, and any changes that may be made to the document are unlikely to affect the format. Some of the other people involved in the effort to create the specification have already started publishing feeds in the new format, and once everything is official, more and larger publishers s...

Example code for Grouper

Antone Roundy — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:48:00 -0600

I've started posting example code for Grouper on the Grouper website. The first two examples cover converting an Atom feed to RSS and generating an RSS feed from a news search--I'm beginning with the basics. More to come.

Gecko Tribe Associates Program

Antone Roundy — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:49:00 -0700

In response to numerous customer requests, we've launched an associates program for selling CaRP, Grouper, Jawfish subscriptions, Chess Hounds memberships, iMovie and FileMaker Pro plugins, t-shirts, and DeGPG. Here's a slight revision of the email we sent out to announce it:

Dear CaRP, Grouper or Jawfish user:

We are pleased today to announce the launch of the Gecko Tribe Associates Program, which offers the opportunity to earn commissions of 10 to 20 percent on sales of Gecko Tribe products. ...

If Atom feed conversion only works part of the time...

Antone Roundy — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:10:00 -0600

If you have been using the XML and Atom plugins for Grouper Evolution to convert Atom feeds to RSS, and it sometimes works, but you sometimes get errors, it may be caused by the character encoding of the Atom feed. To check, load the Atom feed in your web browser, view the source, and take a look at the first line. It will probably look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" charset="UTF-8" ?>

If instead of "UTF-8", it says "ISO-8859-1" or "US-ASCII", then this is not the source of the pr...

When searching in a non-English language...

Antone Roundy — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 11:20:00 -0600

When using Grouper to search Google News in a non-English language, remember to change not only the language setting:

GrouperSourceConf('language','fr');

...but also to update the value of the "toss before" setting as needed. For example, in English, this setting tells Grouper to ignore everything that appears on the results page before the words "by date". In French, "by date" changes to "tri par date". The following setting adjusts for the language change:

GrouperSourceConf('tossbefore',...