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Live Simply Feed Frequently Asked Questions
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Content
What is meant by a full set of listings?
Each feed sent to Live Simply represents a set of listings: "Rental properties
for Mr Jones Estate Agents", or "short term rentals at the Hyde park Hotel". A feed
with a full set of listings means that all currently active listings
for the set are included. Any listing in the set that is not included in
the feed is assumed to have expired, and is removed from our search index.
What is image_urls used for?
The picture provided via the image_url field of a listing is used to add images which then appears in the listing
and in our search
results. This picture must be specifically related to the listing,
and is expected to be an actual picture of the property being listed.
Furthermore, if we are to display a thumbnail of it in our search results,
your robots.txt must allow us to download the image, and the size of the image
must be no more than 30,000 bytes.
Why is robots.txt relevant when I'm sending you a feed?
If the feed contains any image_urls fields, then we need to download
the images at these urls in order to generate thumbnails and link images for the listing. This is
only possible if your robots.txt file allows us access to the urls that these
images are at. Please give access to "LiveSimplybot" in your robots.txt.
# Example robots.txt entry where all images are in an /images/ subdirectory.
User-agent: LiveSimplybot
Allow: /images/
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XML
What does it mean to say that XML is well-formed?
An XML document is said to be well-formed if it meets the requirements for
well-formedness as defined by the W3C. Since this is a technical definition, it is possible to have a computer program check whether
an XML document has this property.
The reason well-formedness is important is that it greatly eases automatic machine parsing of a document.
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How can I check that my XML is well-formed?
There are a variety of publicly available XML validators and formedness checkers that you can obtain and pass your document to. A common
one on many versions of Unix is xmlwf.
If you have perl, libxml, and XML::Simple on your system, you can run:
perl -e 'use XML::Simple(); $xml = XML::Simple::XMLin("./LiveSimply_feed.xml")';
and if it runs with no errors, your document is well-formed.
As a last resort, an online XML formedness checker can be found here.
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What are some things to watch out for in creating an XML feed?
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The characters
& and < cannot appear as-is in document text.
They must be escaped by & and < respectively,
or the block of text the are a part of must be put into a literal text CDATA section. Examples:
<description>
This line with its unescaped & and < is **not** well-formed XML.
</description>
<description>
This line with its escaped & and < *is* well-formed XML.
</description>
<description>
<![CDATA[This line with CDATA-enclosed & and < is *also* well-formed XML.]]>
</description>
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The
encoding attribute should not be set to utf-8 when the document is actually ISO-8859-1 encoded.
Many xml feeds we receive have, as their first line:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
This is perfectly valid xml, but in many cases, the actual character encoding used for the feed is ISO-8859-1.
So, when you are checking that your feed is well-formed, if you get a format error
in the feed file, but you can't see any obvious error at that location, consider changing this top line to:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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Production
How often do you update my listings?
We update your listings daily with in the specified period of time, first we will check is any XML feed is uploaded in the Created FTP account.
The import process will be happend in the period of 2 Am to 6 Am.
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Why don't I see all of my listings in Live Simply?
This could be happening for a variety of reasons. Among the most common are:
- We do not have a valid location for the listing, and so cannot place it.
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The listing was found to be a duplicate of a listing supplied by a different source, or even a duplicate of another listing in the same
feed.
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