How To Use Earlymiser.com - Product RSS Feeds.

One of the things I am going to be doing on the blog is to provide constant tutorials on how to use the site. I realize that the whole concept of feeds, shopping by RSS, as will as the interaction with the product RSS Feeds is a little different and most people will need a little help.

Earlymiser.com is built around the idea of using RSS feeds to make your life a little bit easier. Every product at Early Miser has an RSS feed associated with it. We call that internally the product rss feed. Every product at Early Miser has one. The product RSS feed contains every matching store offer for that product. So you can subscribe to this RSS feed with your RSS reader or aggregator. I would recommend the new Google Reader - a great aggregator similar to Bloglines. Our product RSS feeds have been tested with Google Reader, Bloglines and Sharp Reader The feeds validate using Feed Validator so any RSS reader should be able to use them.

Here's an example of a product I buy a lot of for my Tibetan Mastiffs



This RSS feed is updated everytime the search result is updated at the site. Notice the most recent results that have been updated from Amazon marked in bold on the site. In the title of each entry we have the merchant name, the shopping channel (Amazon, Shopping.com, Ebay, and Yahoo) and the price for the product. Notice remarkably everyone seems to sell this at the same price $43.99 which is what I pay in Santa Fe for the same dog food. I really watch the price for this item as I might buy 5-10 bags at a time for the dogs. It's an excellent dog food especially if you have a primitive breed like I do. For those of you interested, here's the page Innova Evolutionary Diet in the 28LB bag.

I would use product RSS feeds if their is a product that you need to buy a lot of or want the very best price on it. Every product RSS feed can be added to your Yahoo page or your MSN page easily by click on the My Yahoo or My MSN buttons. This way you can get updated pricing on these items EVERY day. The feeds update when the prices change and our product feeds are updated. It's a perfect way to monitor the price of a product you are interested in - the prices are delivered to you in a format you can use in a variety of ways - not just email or the web. Next up I will explain how to use custom feeds on the site.



How To Use EarlyMiser.com Related Posts
How to use Early Miser product RSS feeds
How to use Early Miser custom RSS feeds

Tag Syndication

Ok we are demoing tag syndication tomorrow. This particular feature will allow after you have added items to a feed you can export those items to your own website!

Just like Google Adsense you will be give a simple tool for matching the colors of your site and various formats for exporting your tagged products. Have a lot of products in a feed? Don't worry we will cycle through them so your visitor can see products you have tagged. Why would you even want to do this?

Well for starters let's say you have a new baby on the way. Instead of a random baby shower you can put together a feed for the new mother with everything you need in it. You can then export it to your site or your MySpace page and your friend can know that using earlymiser.com, they will be getting the best possible price on your items. Please feel free to discuss this in the Early Miser Forums

Ok killed them

Account password recovery is now working. Additionally you can have user names with underscores in them. We are still working on tag syndication.

Slay one - it grows two more heads

For some reason - yet undetermined, the site isn't creating the new area for members when they create an account and add a feed. More as I continue to look into the issue.

UPDate - It's a problem with the way I am handling underscores - So no nicknames (which are used in user pages with URL BDespain's page with underscores. Sorry about that - I will clear this up by Monday at the latest.

Quick Bug Notes

Ok. The forgotten password reminder isn't working on the live system for some reason. I am taking a look at it right now. I am also getting a lot of complaints that the account creation process is too cumbersome. This was done to minimize the people harvesting data from the site and re-publishing it. That places an unnecessary load on the server and it pretty frigging annoying to boot.

Removed Digital Music

From the site as the matches we were getting were quite poor and it was only 312 products from Amazon that were affected. We will revisit this after tag syndication launch.

Changes we are working on right now

We are working on caching images (the site can slow down when you have several hundred items in a feed as I do with this page on stem cell research. We are using JPCache a lightweight caching solution for PHP. Additionally we are adding the product name to the Add to Feed pop up window so it will be easier remember what you are adding to a feed.

Upcoming Feature - Shopping by Phone

I am working on few features right now Tag Syndication and the comparison shopping by phone. One of the cool things about WAP enabling the web application is that your feeds will be available via phone so you can set up a custom feed to operate as a shopping list and have it available via mobile phone. That would save on searching via phone (which is always a hassle because of the lack of a keyboard) because you would simple login and have your feeds available. While working on these features I will also be making some small changes like the ones I did yesterday. Allowing users to set their preference on the order of providers is one feature I am likely to do these week. Currently the displayed order is Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping, Amazon, Amazon Marketplace, and Ebay. Some people may want to change that order - I chose that order because it seemed to me during testing that it gave fairly interesting and relatively accurate results. Yahoo currently doesn't allow comparison shopping via UPC which would be the most accurate but their search by product name is fairly accurate.

Done

The features I outlined on Friday are now down and up on the site. As a quick reminder they were

1) (Done) First off when you login you will be directed to your feeds.

2) (Done) Secondly when your feeds appear on the right hand side, the feeds that have been updated will appear bolded.

3) (Done) Thirdly a link to your custom feeds will also appear on the right hand side under the account preferences area.

4) (Done) And lastly the your feed page (which has the URL http://www.earlymiser.com/nickname) will be changed adding update dates on each individual feed when it was updated.

5) (Done) Your feeds that have been recently updated are bolded.

Upcoming Feature - Tag Syndication

I like to highlight upcoming features for the site. One feature I think people will like is one called "Tag Syndication." Tag Syndication will allow you to syndicate your tagged feeds (and the items that you have in that feed) to be displayed on your own site or your MySpace page. You can select the colors and the type of layout you would like (exactly like Adsense). Why would you want to do this? Well suppose you have a baby on the way. You can put everything you will need for the baby shower into a custom feed. You can then syndicate that feed onto your own site. "But I can use Amazon Wishlists for that." Yes you can except of course for the ability to syndicate the feed and the comfort in knowing that your friends are going to be able to buy the things you need at the very lowest price. The breadth of Early Miser assures that we will give you the very broadest coverage of stores on the Internet. If you want to see a feature at Earely Miser, please feel free to drop by our Early Miser Feature Request Forum

User Testing

Is pretty useful. Already my beta testers have made some suggestions for usability I will be implementing post haste. First off when you login you will be directed to your feeds. Secondly when your feeds appear on the right hand side, the feeds that have been updated will appear bolded. Thirdly a link to your custom feeds will also appear on the right hand side under the account preferences area. And lastly the your feed page (which has the URL http://www.earlymiser.com/) will be changed adding update dates on each individual feed when it was updated. If you have a feature you would like to see implemented in Early Miser, please suggest it here on the blog or better yet our Early Miser Feature Request Forum.

Privacy Policy

Here at Earlymiser.com we respect your privacy. You will notice something about this privacy statement. It's gonna be short. You will be able to read it. It will not have been written an attorney.

Let's keep a couple of things clear. We are gonna do our best keep your information private. That said things happen from hurricanes to hackers and it might slip out. That said we do not collect credit card data so your login and email address is the only thing that could slip out.

We don't share your information with outside companies. We do not sell or share your feed information. We don't sell our site usage information. We will not sell our users email addresses. In short we keep our community information private. By making feeds public or private you can decide how much information to share with the community.

By marking a feed private it will be only available to you during a browser session.

This policy might change from time to time.If the website or the company is sold it most certainly will change. I would recommend re-reading the privacy policy once a year.

We will set a cookie on your browser for identification purposes when you log into the site.

Site Errata One

Like all beta projects this one has some errata (ie mistakes). For example on the registration page it currently has a single checkbox for agreeing to our TOS, privacy and signing up for our mailing list. That is a typographic error. The check box is for agreeing to our TOS and privacy policy only. They are supposed to two check boxes. How did we get one in testing? Well it was a simple case of checking something very early on in the project and not checking it later when we moved to the design part of the project. Simple reminder - double check your work Brian!

Here is the privacy policy

Privacy Policy

Here at Earlymiser.com we respect your privacy. You will notice something about this privacy statement. It's gonna be short. You will be able to read it. It will not have been written an attorney.

Let's keep a couple of things clear. We are gonna do our best keep your information private. That said things happen from hurricanes to hackers and it might slip out. That said we do not collect credit card data so your login and email address is the only thing that could slip out.

We don't share your information with outside companies. We do not sell or share your feed information. We don't sell our site usage information. We will not sell our users email addresses. In short we keep our community information private. By making feeds public or private you can decide how much information to share with the community.

By marking a feed private it will be only available to you during a browser session.

This policy might change from time to time.If the website or the company is sold it most certainly will change. I would recommend re-reading the privacy policy once a year.

We will set a cookie on your browser for identification purposes when you log into the site.

Sorry for the confusion on the account form.

Forum

We are currently installing PHPBBB for our forum software. It seems the best solution for quick and easy forum software. One word of advice however, you will need to create a login that is seperate from your login to the site. They can be the same of course but I don't have an single sign on solution. In fact I am wondering if there is a single sign solution for multiple types of content and sites. I mean it's far easier to simply require mulitple logins than it is too link a custom link to the login to Early Miser and a piece of generic software like PHPBBB. Anyway use the forums to discuss changes and features you might be interested in developing. I already have a few in mind such as shopping comparison by SMS and something I call tagSyndication.

Update The forums are now up and running at Early Miser forums

First Post

Remember when Slashdot was cool? Remember how cool it was to get a reasonable insightful first post in just a few lines (which all you could do it in since you had very little time otherwise it wouldn't be the first post). Well this is the first post of the blog for Early Miser and as such I have no rush to push out a witty comment. No one knows about this blog or this site yet really but we have spent a lot of time working on it. Early Miser is a cool web mash up (OK I think it is cool). It's built on top four seperate shopping comparison services and web services. We take the Amazon EWS web service, adding a liberal dose of Shopping.com, a heeping helping of Yahoo Shopping, and add in the ever present Ebay for a blended shopping experience that makes things much easier for the average shopper. We didn't just stop there though. We decided that being a useful meta shopping comparison engine wasn't enough. We decided to add some things to make your life easier.

• RSS Feeds. Every single product has an individual RSS feed. This means you can effectively moniter prices from every shopping channel we have a product. So you don't even need to create an account to take advantage of our service. You can simply add the RSS feed of a product you are interested in monitering into your RSS reader or bloglines. The feed will be updated when the price for that product is updated on any of the sites - Amazon, Shopping.com, Ebay or Yahoo Shopping.
  


• Custom Feeds - Custom feeds allow you to create a group of products you are interested in. For example I have gathered my regular office supplies for my home based office into a feed I have labeled Office Supplies. I have tagged the feed with HP3015, HP1320, toner, cartridge, paper, and refills. Please note to take advantage of custom feeds you need to set up an account
  
  
• Pricing triggers - Pricing triggers allow you to have a feed updated when a specific pricing condition is reached for a any of the products in that custom feed. For example let's say you want to be notified when your product has reached 10% below the trailing seven day average. By setting a pricing trigger in the feed management section of the site the RSS feed associated with your custom feed will be updated when any of the providers you have selected are updated with a price at or below your pricing trigger.
  

There are a ton of great features on the site, I am highlighting just a few of them right now. You can also build a feed and specifically exclude providers or even search results within those providers. In the coming few weeks I am going to be highlighting and explaining how to use various aspects of the site. In the mean time enjoy Early Miser