YQL issue and the Nifty Promo Control Panel

I've partially solved the issue with YQL and the Nifty Promo Control Panel.

What happened

On Thursday 24th August the Yahoo Query Languge RSS feed facility stopped working. Soon after it started to work only intermittently. Many of the tools within the Nifty Control Panel use it, as does the panel itself, so everything stopped working reliably.

The fix

After lots of research on line, I found someone who mentioned that if you keep retrying to pull the feed with YQL, you eventually succeed.

I've only applied this fix to:
1) the control panel's own display while you're getting the products you want
2) the live product grid pull in:
Step 2: Choose your type of promoting->Get code for embedding in other sites->Product Grid code

I've tested the fix and it works just fine. Any new ones you create on your blogs / sites by using the live grid code will now work. It might take a little while longer to display your grid, depending on the number of attempts it has to make in trying to get a successful pull. It'll try up to 10 times before giving up.

(The static product grid code option above the live one works just fine as is - no changes were required)

There is a risk and it's that Verizon (who bought Yahoo) decide to remove YQL completely. If that happens, a completely different approach will need to be developed.

Over the next few days, I'll be applying the same fix to the other tools in the Nifty Promo Control Panel that need them.