ISAPI Rewrite Convert for AllPosters.com PostersFeed
For quite some time I had a posters page on hockeyfights.com as an affiliate of allposters.com (affiliate link).
At first, I created a series of manual links from a text file they had. I downloaded preview images and the info needed, dumped some of it into a db and had a couple of pages.
It became a bit much to keep up with, so I stopped. I took a little piece of code from their affiliate website and just had an iframe that displayed a few top sellers that someone could scroll through. Not really ideal, but no work involved.
Eventually allposters.com released a datafeed. You download a series of files (text, csv or xml) and have all their store information. You can then easily dump it into a database (or use the files as they are if you like) and can build a relatively dynamic store from that. Images and such are all stored on their site and locations/names are referenced in the datafeed files. I wanted to do something with it, but never got around to it.
Semi-recently allposters.com released web services. Web services allow you to access all of their store info on their own machines. No more frequent manual updates. While I know I’d still have to update some code now and then, this was ideal and I wanted to take advantage of this to make a nice looking store front for my users.
Instead of building from the ground up I looked for an already built solution. I found a few ok ones and then I came upon PostersFeed XML by One Click Designs (demo store). It was neat and a good base for me to work with. I also liked that they offered Posters Feed Professional, which is the same script, but with a slight modification for mod_rewrite, allowing you to have cleaner urls (so besides looking nicer, they can be copy and pasted easier, and search engines will follow them easier). mod_rewrite is Apache web server-only. However, Helicon has made an alternative for us IIS users: ISAPI Rewrite. I use it a good deal already. I don’t run Wordpress anymore, but when I did I had a good set of rules that allowed me to do the same url rewrite as Apache users.
So with Posters Feed Professional and ISAPI Rewrite, and a few other conversions to the base script I was able to build a nice hockey posters store for hockeyfights.com. I’m not completely finished with it yet. I will probably add a few more “convenience” links on the right, along with replacing the ad up top with a posters ad (or perhaps a Google Adsense ad). I also plan on having posters come up on actual team and player pages when applicable. This is something that will require a bit more work, but should look pretty good when done (along with hopefully producing some nice conversion rates).
I’d love to post the code for the ISAPI Rewrite modification, but One Click Designs charges for the mod_rewrite tweaks (the base script is free, although they ask you sign up for the affiliate program through them so you would be a child affiliate of theirs at no cost to you). Because the ISAPI Rewrite script isn’t that different from it’s mod_rewrite counterpart I’d basically be giving their script away for free, which is something I obviously shouldn’t do. However, if you look at a few conversions (like the Wordpress one, or a few on Helicon’s forums), it shouldn’t be too hard for you to do the conversion yourself.
Here’s an allposters.com webmaster affiliate link, in case you’re looking to sign up as an allposters.com affiliate yourself.
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