PhishThis!

I finally did it. I got the e-commerce bug and started my own shop. I’m working with Dave K on it, and we’re progressing quite well with a lot of mentoring from Bill and all of his XekoShop experience.

So, PhishThis will contain a lot of posts related to how I’m making like easier for myself as far as batch watermarking, getting images, etc.

Here’s one:

I need to scan all of my cards for Chaotic. But they have them all online and could save me some trouble. However, I don’t feel like right-click-saving 250 times. Enter, you guessed it, PowerShell.

I need to create a web client to connect to the site.

$wc = new-object system.net.webclient

Now, the site requires a login. You might say “CRAP!” However, the webclient supports passing credentials, as long as they’re typed as system.net.networkcredential

So, I can login to the site, from PowerShell with:

$wc.credentials = new-object system.net.networkcredential("username", "password")


Now, there were around 250 images, so I construct a simple for loop that uses $wc.downloadfile(”source”, “location”) and we end up with:


$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.credentials = new-object system.net.networkcredential("username", "password")
for ($i = 0; $i -lt 250;$i++)
{
  $wc.downloadfile("www.foobar.com/getimages.aspx?ImageID=$($i)", "C:\images\$($i).jpg")
}


This script saved me HOURS of scanning and stuff…and now, even if the card is out of stock, I still have the image. That makes sense in my head.  

After, I set my view for that folder to EXTRA LARGE icons. This shows a readable preview of the jpeg. I renamed the first one, and instead of hitting enter after each one, I hit tab, and it went to the next file to rename it. I didn’t know you could do that, and tried on a whim. Saved me many keystrokes.

Next, I’m going to need to add them all to Zen Cart. Since I’m lazy a script kiddy, I’m going to write a script that will look at all of the product images in a folder, and write my SQL queries based on them. Hopefully I’ll even get it to do all of my formatting, too. We’ll see. Look for that this weekend sometime.