SingleFeed Blog

Google Base is in the process of performing maintenance on their systems.  During this period, at least through Wednesday, July 18th, according to the Google Base folks, individuals will be unable to (1) register for new bulk uploads or (2) submit new products.  In addition, Google states that currently live products should not be impacted by this maintenance.

SingleFeed will continue to submit your feed to Google Base and your other Engines on our daily schedule.  As soon as Google Base’s maintence has concluded your feeds will be automatically sent, as usual, during the upcoming feed submission cycle.

To read more you can read the alert notice straight from the source @ Google Base:

• Google Base Blog Post: ‘File registration and uploading temporarily unavailable’
  http://googlebase.blogspot.com/2007/07/file-registration-and-uploading.html

We will pass along any updates on this issue on to you via our blog.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed

Shopzilla’s FTP servers are back up and running.

In today’s daily feed submission, every SingleFeed member who has products for submission to Shopzilla were successfully submitted.

Thank you.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed

Shopzilla’s servers are currently experiencing some technical problems that impact the submission of new data feeds.  We are in touch with our friends at Shopzilla to be able to provide you the latest updates on this matter as soon as we have them.

What does it mean for you?
SingleFeed is designed to continue to poll the Shopping Engines that are having trouble and submit your feeds as soon as any Shopping Engine that is having temporary difficulties is resolved.

Updates
Stay tuned here. As soon as we hear more or observe that the situation has cleared up we will let you know that everything has returned to normal.

BTW
Also, take note, that no other engines are impacted by this issue; and your SingleFeeds are being submitted to all other engines that you have enabled and on schedule.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed

SingleFeed.com is currently performing another system-wide upgrade. You can expect slow responsiveness from the site for the next 24-48 hours while this upgrade is being occurring.

After this service improvement has been completed, you will directly benefit from significantly improved performance (especially speed) of…

• the Correction Wizard, and
• Interaction with all elements and functions of your Products Page (summary, edit, upload, list).

We have also, as part of this release, upgraded our architecture so that no matter how complex an operation another user may be performing at SingleFeed, each member’s activities will have little to no performance impact on any other active member.

Thank you for your patience.
Jeremy Horn

Google Base notified its users last night through it’s nifty status update module in its help center that:

“FTP Processing Issue Resolved: Our engineering team has finished correcting the issue that has been affecting our FTP machines over the past few days. Our file processor is now catching up and handling files submitted earlier this week. We expect that our system
will be completely caught up by tomorrow (3/22).”

From what I can tell, the processing is not completely caught up.

Also, I want to properly set expectations for our users. While we’re submitting your feeds every 24 hours, we unfortunately have no control over what happens on the shopping engines’ side. We’re in touch with all the engines to properly push your feeds through, but sometimes there can be delays. Right now this isn’t being properly communicated to our users and we’ll work on fixing that soon.

As for new users, we’re about to update our FAQ/Help pages as well as the rest of our documentation. It’s important to note that it can take up to 5 days to properly submit a feed the first time (only the first submission takes this long). On our end, it takes up to 2 days to categorize your products and then on the shopping engines’ side, mapping and other set up processes can take up to 3 days. We strive to get new feeds up and running ASAP. Please note that any company that guarantees your products will be up and running in 24 hours is just not telling you the truth.

Google’s FTP servers are back online after their earlier problems.

Connectivity between SingleFeed and Google Base / Froogle FTP servers has been restored.

We are still seeing reports of sporadic connectivity problems being experienced by other servers (non-SingleFeed) connecting to Google’s FTP around the Internet.  It looks like Google (and/or Internet infrastructure folks) are working on the problem and connectivity is gradually being restored to everyone.

More Technical Stuff
At the moment, it looks like there may be some routing problems being experienced (as opposed to the earlier assessment of DNS issues).

And more…
If there are any more developments that may impact you, the SingleFeed customer, in any way, we will be sure to post updates here, at the SingleFeed Blog, as soon as we hear anything.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed

IMPORTANT:  the domain where feeds are submitted for Google Base / Froogle appears to be broken on the DNS backbone as of the writing of this post.

Technical Jargon
Tonight, we ran a bunch of traceroutes from locations all over the world to try to see if there was a clear path through to the Google FTP, but received failed paths.

What does it mean for you?
While the issue is not being caused by SingleFeed, but by the DNS backbone, we (and anyone who wants to post to Google Base / Froogle) are still impacted.  You will experience long delays in any attempts to activate a new Google Base / Froogle account and posting of the product feed will not be possible by anyone until the DNS backbone rights itself.  For now, we recommend, if you need to make any changes to your Google Base / Froogle Engine to save the changes with the Engine set to inactive; you will have to come back later (once Google has cleared up this matter) to attempt toggle the engine to its active state.

Updates
Stay tuned here.  As soon as we hear more or observe that the situation has cleared up we will let you know that everything has returned to normal.

BTW
Also, take note, no other engines are impacted by this issue; and your SingleFeeds are being submitted to all other engines that you have enabled on schedule.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed