As a web developer, I have the fun of creating feeds for different agents to use as a means to get their listings onto some of the bigger listing web sites (Trulia, Zillow, formerly edgeio, Vast, etc.). All of these sites have different specifications as to how to format the feed but a few things remain consistent throughout. Here is a list from a programmer’s perspective to the most problematic things that we see when developing feeds from agent input.

• Use numbers when it makes sense to use them. This might not seem like a big deal when you put your listing information into a system, but when see an entry for a field that should probably be numerical, please use numbers only. Many times I see “.2 A” or “Half Acre”, but a computer can’t understand that. When this data gets passed into a feed, it shows up as a bug, because the computer was expecting a number. In today’s world, computers are getting closer and closer to performing like magic. But in reality, systems are all still built by humans, and one small error like this can break your entire feed or have your listings rejected. This includes the number of bathrooms. See below.
• When displaying the number of beds and baths, just use one number. If the home has 2 full baths and a half bath, round up or down, and put a chunk of text in the description to say how many beds/baths it has. This one is so common, as people will read that the number of bathrooms needs to be a numerical value (or an int), so they use 2.5 as that is a number. This still breaks the feed, as one number was expected, with no decimal points, to give a correct value to the server.
• Stop using the ampersand. The ampersand (&) is a nice shortcut. It looks pretty and saves you a very little amount of time by making you press two keys instead of three. But this key is a bad key to use when you want it in a text block. This is a special character as far as web systems go, and it usually tells the computer, “Stop displaying text, and get ready for a command.” When you use the ampersand, web systems convert it (for the most part, if you have a good web coder) into &. Each and every character you see on the screen has some weird version like that one that will make it hard for you to read, but the computer prefers it. All of these start with the ampersand. Here is a list. In general, it is a good idea to avoid all special characters, including the @ symbol.
• When uploading a file, don’t have spaces in the name of the file. This one isn’t as bad, as most up to date browsers can deal with spaces, but it is more of a guideline than a hard rule. Notice how no domain names have spaces? It is for a reason. In code, spaces usually help the coder understand and read the code more clearly, but computers can do many things with it. With some systems, white space is ignored, while in others, it is necessary to have it just right to have a working system. For now, replace spaces with the hyphen or underscore and save all of us an unnecessary headache.

There are more problems that show up when trying to make a feed out of listings, but for now, if you are trying to get a feed submitted to any of the classified sites, and it isn’t working, really read the examples close. Each website will have a spec sheet that you can use to help you format your feed and data. What you think might not be an issue could be the one big problem keeping you out of the system.