I have some PHP pages that display news headlines, currently if the headlines are older than a certain amount I go off, access the news feed, save the new headlines in the database and then display them. However at
certain times the process of fetching the headlines can take a long time, and if the headline server is unavailable there is the wait for a time out all of which slows down the display of the page unacceptably.
So what I would like to do is kick off the update process and let it run in the
background and just display the out of date data for the moment.
Is there any way to do this sort of thing in PHP?
In small words please, I'm still relativly new to PHP :-)
