Confused about Bulk Import instructions

@andysaks,
This may help:

• name of the text file does not matter. Can be “anything.txt” or ‘wahtever.txt’. Just make sure you use a plain text editor like notepad (windows) or TextEdit (mac). Do not use Microsoft Word, as that is not a plain text editor.
• Correct – a pipe character is the vertical line above the Enter key – “|”.
• New Window flag just means you want it to open in a new window (it adds target='_blank' to the link). You would use a boolean value, so 1=open in a new window and 0=do not.
• No Follow Flag is basically the same as the New Window Flag, but wants to know if you want a rel="nofollow" attribute added to any links that will redirect. 1=yes, 0=no.
• The |0|1 in line 1 means Do Not Open in a New Window (0) but add a nofollow (1).
• The |1|0 is the opposite of above – open in new window but do not add nofollow.
• /test/ in line 3 is the link to redirect, i.e., a page that might have a URL like https://mysite.com/test/. You do not add the domain name to the redirects, so all that is left is /test/.
• I think by now you should know the |1|1 at the end of the 3rd line means open in a new window and add a nofollow attribute.
• There is no space between redirects, just a line break (by hitting enter between each one). There are also no space between each element, just the “|” (pipe).
• the new window and no follow flags are optional. You only need them if you really want a link to open in a new window or need the nofollow attribute. Also note that they really do not work consistently at this time but may be fixed in an update soon. Most of the time, Quick redirects are just used to point a page to another location, so you don’t need them.

In your case, your text file would start like this:

/2013/12/guest-blog-dear-trade-show-exhibit-buyer-open-letter-first-time-exhibitors/|/trade-show-booth-ideas-new-exhibitor/|0|0
next redirect goes here...
and next here...
and so on...

MAKE SURE you start your links with the root marker (/) which means from the root of the domain (whatever comes after the yoursite.com in a URL).

If you are really unsure, add a few redirects in the Quick Redirect page itself and then export them. It will give you a text file with the exact layout needed. That file will have a weird name, but that is only for the your use so you can save them whenever you want and know that the date is that is was created. Your actual text file can be whatever name you want.

Hope this helps.
Warm regards,
Don

Hi Don,

Thank you so much for your very thorough explanation and very quick posting, I deeply appreciate both. It’s obvious you’re very responsive to your plugin users.

I read through your explanation and it makes a lot of sense. Your sample and explanation in the plugin made it sound much more complicated to me than it really is.

Partially it’s because I think I misread the top line “redirect|destination|0|1” as a line of code that had to be inserted with each redirect, rather than a model to follow. Partially it’s all the “0|1” codes at the end of each line that I didn’t end up needing, and you advised against using. Partially it’s using terms like “PIPE” without a quick definition in parentheses or link to a page that defines it. I couldn’t keep up.

Also, it might be easier for newbies like me to interpret your instructions by ourselves if you could use SnagIt or similar app to circle each segment of the code in red and write its explanation in text nearby, so we could look at the code and understand each elements definition and role simultaneously. I had a really hard time matching your explanation sentence to various parts of the sample code.

The thing that helped the most was suggesting I do a few one-by-one redirects and export the file to use as a model. Once I did that with five sample redirects it all made sense quickly.

It’s also worth mentioning that Apple has recently added TextEdit to its iCloud application suite and in doing so seems to have removed the txt format as an option, I couldn’t find it. The only way I could open a txt file in TextEdit was to Export my five sample links from your plugin and open the txt file I downloaded from you.

I wondered if you could work in Excel too and save as a txt file from there, and if so, how you’d arrange each redirect in each cell (i.e. all redirect instructions in a single cell, or old slug in one cell and new URL in cell below, or something else?).

Anyway, thanks again for your quick help, I’m going to attack this in the next few days and will yell if I have any more questions. Great plugin!!!

Andy

Andy,
You are welcome.
The next version will have a little more detail in the instructions. When that feature was added, it was sort of last minute and there was a rush to get some form of instructions with it – even if it was not the best for newbies.

You definitely could use Excel to create the txt file, but you would have to make sure you used the pipe separator. Excel only does tab or comma separated files by default and trying to figure out how to use a pipe as a separator is over most people’s head, so we did not include that as an option (not to mention, that not everyone has access to Excel).

The best thing to do is find a text editor you like that edits plain text and keep using that. I am on a PC so i have used notepad as my editor for over 15 years. In fact I used to program in notepad when I first started all those years ago – before I found better code editors.

Best of luck in your quest,
Don

Hi Don –

Follow-up to Bulk Import project:

Bad news: The txt file with the ~70 redirects I bulk imported to your plugin didn’t work. I created the string of old and new links in Excel and output to a txt file, opened in Apple’s TextEdit, visually they looked perfect, exactly matching your formula. I uploaded them to your plugin and got a successful upload message, BUT they didn’t appear in the redirect list, and all the ones I spot checked didn’t work.

I tried again copying and pasting a new text editor called TextWrangler, and each time the editor froze when I saved the txt file. I tried all kinds of things, like making sure I wasn’t exporting Excel formulas but had the real values in there, even entering just one redirect as a test, and nothing stopped the freezing problem.

I’m still wondering what I did wrong…? The only way I see to create a txt file that might work is to copy and paste each link from Excel (or wherever) manually, and if you’re going to do that, you might as well just copy and paste them directly into the plugin manually.

Good news: Finally I just entered all the redirects directly into the plugin manually, they all worked, and it only took about half an hour.

thank you again for the plugin, still hoping I can conquer this problem for future projects —

Andy