Linked Up Design

Recently I had a client that need to upload a 2000 row 13 column excel spreadsheet to a MySQL database. The client is a car broker who basically helps people find specific cars and he also buys luxury cars and sells them via his website.

Being that his distributor gives him access to his database, we thought it would be a good idea to feature this on his website so we decided to add a search feature to the site so if someone was looking for a specific make of car, the search would bring back his distributor’s inventory of that make and then break it down from there. Sound simple but being that I almost no training when it comes to SQL or MySQL, I had to figure out a way to upload this inventory list to a MySQL database. Of course I tried for days to find a way to do this via Google but came up short until I found a someone who lead me in the right direction. So here is what I figured out!

First thing is first, what was I working with:

1. Excel for Mac 2007 version.

2. phpMyAdmin 3.2.2.1

3. MySQL 5.4.3 beta version

4. Running off my local host which really does not matter too much.

So here is how I went about this:

1. First step was to establish in MySQL a database and set up the columns of the database. (If you are not up to that stage, feel free to contact me and I can walk you through this!!) Obviously the columns should match the columns in your spreadsheet. Please note, that if you, which you should have, added a column for “id” Primary Key and Auto Increment, you will need to add this to your first column of your spreadsheet and sequentially add the numbers to the column to go along with the number of items in the spreadsheet.
2. Then in your excel spreadsheet you will want to remove the top line or the column names so you are just showing the data that you want to upload in to the database.
3. Make sure that all the cells in your spreadsheet are all flushed left. You can not have any arbitrary spacing in this format.
4. In the column after the last data entry column you are going to want to add “|” in each of the cells to match up with the rows of data. This is going to be used in your SQL upload code as the break for each row.  Your spreadsheet ends at Column “R” then place the “|” in Column “S”.
5. Save As the file as a CSV. (If you want, you can open this file in a text editor program and you will see the layout of the rows like so (item 1, item 2, item 3, item 4, item 5 | ) This would continue on each row with the ” | ” at the end again to show a stop in the row.
6. Now go to your MySQL program whether it is with your hosting company or on a local host, usually this will be a phpMyAdmin format.
7. Go in to the new database and then select “import” tab but make sure you have selected the database that you are looking with.
8. You will notice that at the top of the page you can upload the file that you are looking to use which you should do now.
9. Once you press the import button will notice now that they format of page has changed a bit. FORMATS OF IMPORTED FILE has changed and added a new option, CSV using LOAD DATA which you are going to want to select.
10. In the Options you are going to want to check “Replace table data with File”. Then skip down to the next section.
11. There should be 4 short boxes and then 1 long one. In the first box, “Field terminated by: put in a coma “,” then delete what is in the next 2 boxes.
12. The 4th box should read the Lines Terminated by and you are going to put a “|” in this box. Basically what you are doing is telling SQL that you are loading information in to the fields of the existing database and the break of each item is a “,” and break of each line is a “|”.
13. Now delete what ever is in the long box and hit submit.

As long as you have matched up your columns with your database columns this will work. It is probably a bit unconventional but at the same it worked for what I was doing and it should work for you.

I have had a few wild things that I have had to learn for a new site that I am working on so I will be writing a few new articles very soon.

First is going to be on uploading Excel Spreadsheets to MySQL directly, not using PHP or ASP code to get this done.

Other is going to be on making a search function for a website using MySQL and PHP. This one will be submitted to Dreamweaver directly because there is a huge mistake on their instructions on how to do this. I found 3 websites that pretty much gave directions on doing this exactly the same and all 3 forgot to include the most fundamental actions in the form that make the search work!

I will put these up right before the new year as I have a few websites that I am working on right now.

I read a great article this morning about Google Caffeine. When I first saw this I thought that Starbucks and Google got together and made up a new drink for us web designers that would make it so we did not need to sleep any more so we can spend more of our time designing and less time sleeping! Well I was wrong about that.

Google Caffeine is a new search engine network that Google is going to be launching after the first of the year. I would suggest that you read the article yourself for more information about what Google is doing.

A few key points that I saw in this article that is very important for all of us. First was the point about when Google got started in 1998. One of their key ideas was to make it easier for small and medium sized companies to be able to be found in the search engines. At that point, the bigger companies with what seems like a bottomless pit of money for advertising were basically able to buy their way to the top which is still the same today but Google set up their search engine to rank sites based on their keywords, description, title, content, hits, etc, etc! One thing that Google did that made it easier for the big business to be able to jack up their page ranking was with back links. The more back links, the higher the ranking of a site. So of course companies popped up that made programs to build up back links and so the big companies were able to take over the rankings again.

Well Google Caffeine is going to try and change this by going back to the basics and start to rank sites based on the basics as well as how easily sites load to the browsers and now the amount of social bookmarks a site has. Well what is a social bookmark, this is your links to social media sites like, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, etc. Basically Google has seen the light with regards to the latest web trend, our social media market which really has taken off over the last few years. Hell, you are reading this blog, aren’t you and I have a crap load of links to my and my clients sites so the proof is in the pudding here.

Unfortunately this concept of Google will be short lived. Social Media Marketing is a hot trend and if you take a good look at the multinational companies, you will see more and more on their sites, print and TV advertising “Follow us on:“.  These companies will start to co-op the social media market which will then give them the edge in the market again within a year or so. You will also see that the social media big boys will really be able to capitalize on this trend which means bigger buck in their pockets and less for the little guys out there. At least for now, all is good and those who are catching up to this social media marketing gravy train will be able to make a few bucks!!

I spent pretty much the whole evening looking up how to get a screen shot of something on my MacBook today and I must admit that I feel a bit silly not know this but here it is:

Hold down shift, command and the number 3.

Once you do this, a screen shot will be saved on your desktop. It will be a shot of your entire screen so if you are looking for something specific you can take it in to any image program and then crop it and save it in what ever format you need.

If you are looking for screen shots of a website there are a ton of programs that you can download to use for this but if you want to avoid having to pay for something that take a few minutes to do for free then follow my instructions above.

Over the past few months I have spoken to a few clients with regards to taking care of their site once I have building it for them especially those that I did SEO work for. A few did not understand why it was that you need to keep updating your site in order to keep it up in the rankings.

The reason a site constantly needs attention is because the web spiders of the site basically pass over your site once they have detected it so there is no reason for them to crawl through your code any more. Spiders spend there time looking for new things to update their servers with so if your site has been up for a few months you are basically going to be ignored and newer sites or updated sites will start to move up in the rankings.

Think of it like a car dealer. You drive by it and see shinny new cars in the front lot, some catch your eye and some don’t, but you still notice the cars. Say 4 months later, after you have driven by the lot a few times and there is nothing new about the lot and the cars are getting dirtier and dirtier because no one is taking care of them. Then a new car lot opens right next to them and their cars are all shinny and new looking, this gets your attention and you start to pay attention to this new lot. Your site is no different and if you do not take of the site, it will start to drop in ranking.

Now I am not suggesting that you need to redesign your site every few month. What I am suggesting is that you change something. Update a few pictures, if you have a new hire you can add them to the about us or you have some major news about the company, you can add a link, do something to keep the spiders interested in your site.