Almost settled down now – just one tip out of this – make sure you clear down your cookies, they seem to confuse google base just a bit.
When they are cleared down you actually see the items correctly, until then – if you find that your feed disappears from the dashboard and then the same with your items you are hitting the same problem. Log off – close down the window and start a brand new session – you may wany to clear your cache as well.
Well, now have just one feed showing in google – although even that isn’t consistently showing. For the moment, I’ve reverted to using the good old froogle feed which works fine.
 In principle the key of base is supposed to be title – it seems to be a hybrid between the title and the content of the old froogle feed. My suggestion – don’t change your ID!
I did “decide to be clever” and because my client has some products in multiple categories instead of deduping on the server I thought I’d change the key field to product and use the product key (which is an identity column) and add a customer prefix rather than using the stock code – easier to dedupe by ordering into product id order and then if the key is same as previous record – don’t output the record.
 Well, as I said earlier – I’ve now gone back to the original file… Says it all really – have been juggling between having each item posted twice (and then having them held by google base) or only ever having one set of data (which I want) but then my base items seem to alternate between new and old entries on an adhoc basis.
On the plus side – at least the new FTP side is more resiliant than good old hedwig. FTP’s actually work every time instead of a one in three hit rate.
Been having lots of fun lately with google base – replacement for the old feed to froogle for License to Frill Lingerie which now allows you to supply extra details. But seem to be having account problems there – depending on whether I use .com or .co.uk – different feeds, uploads are not showing in both.
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