Consider the following scenario …
I have 1000 images of stock charts, each showing price developments for a unique stock symbol. I generated these images yesterday after the market closed. This morning I got a bright idea: why not display these images on a website using WIX?! Unfortunately, my excitement quickly dissipated because the market opens again soon, and my charts will be outdated already by tomorrow.
So, I start to think. I can generate 1000 new charts every day, no problem. But how do I replace the old charts on my website with these newly generated ones? I start looking into collections, and I’m on the right path. I note that WIX collections have a field type called “URL” and get excited again thinking about the following intuitive solution:
“Why not store my images on an image server like, for example, Sirv dot com?” Could I not … :
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Generate new images daily
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Name each image systematically using unique stock symbols, such as IBM.png.
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Delete the old images in my Sirv-folder.
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Bulk-upload the new images to the now empty Sirv-folder.
“Here is the great part!” I think to myself, getting even more excited. “Since Sirv gives me a static URL for each image given my image-naming convention, I can take the URLs from Sirv and let WIX know about them in my WIX collection! How easy is that?! When my Sirv-folder has been refreshed, so has my WIX page!”
At least, that was the idea. Reality hit me hard, so now I am writing this post…
I watched some tutorials where they go through the elegant process of linking parts of dynamic pages to a collection simply by clicking on the relevant fields. However, when it came to connecting my image to the URL field in my collection, it could not be done - the URL heading was grayed out! Oh no!
Should I upload my images into the collection manually? I have 1000 of them, and they must be changed daily! “Ah!” I thought, “What about the CSV functionality!? Perhaps I can specify the Sirv-URL in the CSV, and WIX will fetch the images for me!?”. No, at least I couldn’t work out how.
As a last resort, I thought I could refresh my images in the WIX media manager, and WIX could fetch them from there. Why I had yet to get this idea right away, I don’t know. But, never mind. That didn’t work, either. For some strange reason, WIX scrambles any connection between my file-naming covention and the URL it gives my image! And because there is no predictable connection, I cannot automate refreshing my images…
Help! What do I do? How do I solve my problem?
I am reluctant to generate charts on WIX because the images I create outside WIX are fantastic. Also, this problem must be generalizable to other things besides stock charts.
Can it really be that hard?