Froogle Feed
One ManCave project I spend a lot of time working on is providing consultancy, development and support for a family business. A task that has been ongoing over the past week or so has been to provide a Froogle data feed. Yesterday after passing the Froogle review process and after having sorted a few teething problems that feed went live, the results of which can be seen here
Froogle data feeds are more accurately FTP'd batch data files containing information on each product a retailer offers. Froogle gives instructions on how to generate these using a basic text editor or via Microsoft Excel but this can be a laborious task especially when you want to generate them on a regular basis; generating them nightly is probably more appropriate for a regularly-changing online store (you must generate them at least once-monthly to avoid dropping off Froogle altogether).
If anyone else is thinking of submitting Froogle feeds I urge you to check your feed carefully. Initial submissions can take up to 7 working days to be checked by Froogle so relying on Froogle to report errors in your feed can seriously delay your feed going live.
For my client the process is achieved using a Perl script run nightly from a cron job. The Perl script extracts the product list from the database and forms the data feed file according to the Froogle specification. The cron job then automatically connects to Froogle and uploads the file via FTP.
Re: Froogle Feed
Cron is a scheduler for unix that allows you to run command and scripts at predefined times. For a good explanation see here. If you are using Windows then you might try something like VisualCron though I've never used this myself (I just Googled cron on Windows).
In the case of CyberSelect cron runs a perl script that extracts all the products and their details from the website database into a file. It then reformats the file according to Froogle's rules and then uploads it. It does this nightly. How you do it depends on how you are running your shop site. If you have a database running your site you might like to attempt something similar. The bulk of the work is the script. If you are hand-coding webpages then it's going to be a much more arduous task.