Tutorial

Please email me any sites that you create so I can offer them to other QuickBuy users!

QuickBuy Site Designer (email me with questions or help if you need it mluker@mluker.com)

The QuickBuy Site Designer is what makes QuickBuy stand out from other trackers/monitors. You can use the Site Designer to make your own Site Design Files or edit existing Site Design Files. I will now try my best to explain how to use it! With that said, strap on your geek hat, grab some Redbull and dive into the Site Designer!

It is actually very simple to create your own Site Design File using the site designer. The basic procedure is outlined below:

• Browse to the site you want to monitor.

• View the page source (HTML code).
            a. Firefox users go to the menu View >> Page Source.
            b. IE users go to the menu View >> Source.

• Locate the items you want to parse.

• Fill in the fields in the Site Designer with the HTML that is before and after the value you want to parse.

Easy right! Now I will go into better detail. I will be using woot.com as my sample page. I will start at step 3 because that is where it starts to get tricky.

Open The Site Designer

• From QuickBuy's menu choose Tools >> Site Designer.

• Click the "Create New" button.

• Fill in the "Site Title" (you can put any descriptive value you want)

• Fill in the "Site Source URL" (the url to the page you want to parse)

• Fill in the "View Item URL" (if the page to view the item online is different than the "Site Source URL" it goes here)

  • For example, if you use woots rss feed as your source but want the "View" button to bring you to woots home page.

• Fill in the "Item Purchase URL" (this is the url that you are directed to when you click the buy button the the websites homepage)

  • If the url has a ID in it, exclude the ID from this field. For example woots is "http://www.woot.com/WantOne.aspx?id="

• The Item Title, Item Price, and Item Condition are self-explanatory.

• Fill in the "Item Status (sold out)". (if the value you enter here is NOT found, it sets the item to In-Stock.

• Fill in the  "Item Quantity" (not many sites offer a quantity remaining, but if they do use this field to get the remaining quantity)

• Fill in the "Item ID". (this is used to get the product ID so the "Buy" button can bring you to the right page)

• Fill in the "Item Image". (gets the image that you want to display for this item)

• Fill in the "Special Active". (if the value you enter is found, it triggers the flashing lights and the alerts will have a flashing light too!)

Parsing Text From Sale Site.
In this example we will parse out the Item Title.

1. Search the page source (HTML) for the value you are seeking. In our case, it is 'TomTom GO 510 Portable Vehicle Navigator'. I copied the line from the HTML where it was found. You can see it below.

<h3 id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder_TitleHeader">TomTom GO 510 Portable GPS Vehicle Navigator</h3>

2. Now that we have located the text we want to parse all we have to do is copy the HTML before and after the text we want and paste it into the Site Designer in the appropriate field.

   <h3 id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder_TitleHeader">TomTom GO 510 Portable GPS Vehicle Navigator</h3>

   The first "Item Title" field in the Site Designer will be <h3 id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder_TitleHeader">
   The second "Item Title" field in the Site Designer will be </h3>

   Now, click the "Test" button in the Site Designer and you should see the value of what was between your two fields!

   Follow the above step for all of the items you want to parse! It's that easy.