I finished up modifications to whats-hot-weekly.com. There is now a drop-down list which lets the users choose their country. This is all handled with eBay site IDs. Categories are still being stored in a MySQL database locally on the server. This make the menus function much better. I’ve already noticed many people in the UK, Canada, Spain, France, and Australia are using the site. Currently the site is averaging over 100 unique visitors per day. This isn’t great but it’s nice to have even that many people interested in your work.
Tag: whats-hot-weekly.com
Updating Whats-hot-weekly
My task for this morning is to add additional site codes to whats-hot-weekly.com. It’s not an easy task. At least, it isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. All of the categories are pulled from a database that I refresh every so often. The database only contains the categories for the US eBay site. This is where it gets hairy because I wasn’t aware before now that the other countries used didn’t categories. So, now my task is to add all the categories so I can implement the additional sites.
This is going to take a while. The US along takes around half an hour. There are many other sites. I’ve recreated the database adding a field to record the site_id. Next I’ll run my scripts to populate the database with API calls. After I populate the database for the US, I’ll switch the site codes manually and add the next site. I would automate this but I would rather monitor it anyway so I thought I may as well do it manually.
The big issue that will come up later is currencies. I’ll have to adjust for that. I’ll also have to recreate the same code on the static version of the site.
While I wait for the database to refresh, the old site is still running as normal. I have a development environment that is a working copy of the production environment. I’ll make the switch there, then simply move it over to production from there. There should be exactly no downtime to the site. I hope.