In the post I wrote

They should really be delivering banners of various sizes to us every day without having to change any code, and an RSS or XML feed to play around with.
It needs to be a graphic without using any javascript, so it can be used anywhere.

I know the DDC guys read my blog, they have told me this a number of times in the past, and I would say there is a 99% chance that at least someone from DDC has read this article.
I am not sure there is a need to email them directly, and I would be amazed if they haven’t already got Marc coming up with some kind of automatic banner creator.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DealDotComToday

I’ve also been trying to get a hold of them to see if they could setup and extended datafeed page that includes as much data as possible — like original price, salesletter URL, etc. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard back from them yet… Any tips on getting a hold of them would be appreciated.

Also, I wanted to followup from my last post and say that I’ve seen how you’ve updated the plugin — as I said before, great job! :-)

http://www.dealdotcom.com/wp

for our plugin to work. Have you considered asking them to make a page that does the same thing but wraps it as xml?

I don’t feel our plugin is junk personally. If you have suggestions or constructive critism though I am all ears.

They are using WordPress
They have all the products in a specific category
Wordpress creates RSS feeds for categories just by adding /feed/

Yet all the plugins are having to scrape them

The category feed doesn’t contain a decent excerpt, it is just using the_excerpt_rss, which generates an ugly automatic excerpt without formatting or images.

All they need to do is use a plugin to automatically create decent custom excerpt with images, and that could be used extensively.

All the solutions so far are junk compared to what should be possible.

$cache_time = 60 * 60 * 24; // 1 day, seconds * minutes * hours
$xml_cache_time = 7 * 60 * 60 * 24; //cache xml for 7 days
$cache_file = "./thumbs/blogcatalog-thumb-" . $blogcatalog_url . ".txt"; // where to save cache file and save it as
$img_cache_file =  "./thumbs/blogcatalog-thumb-" . $blogcatalog_url . ".jpg"; // where to save image cache file and save it as
$local_xml = "./thumbs/" . $blogcatalog_url . ".xml"; // where to save xml cache file and save it as

// End of Settings - Do not edit below this line - unless you want to that is ;)

if ($blogcatalog_key != "" && $blogcatalog_url != "") {
	if (file_exists($cache_file) && (time() - $cache_time < filemtime($cache_file))) {
		include_once($cache_file);
		echo "<!-- Cached: " . date("Y-m-d H:i:s", filemtime($cache_file)) . " -->\n";
	}
	else {

// You need to scrape them and write it to file - you should be able to manage the rest

Yes I have been playing with the Blogcatalog API a little

If someone wants to add that ability into the plugin post it on the blog and I will add it.

That way you refresh cache every hour

No need for cron or databases.