"Sharing news"

[twiggy]

Hello all.

What I'm trying to ask is: I have some news on my site, that I'm adding regulary, about 5-10 per day ... and people come on this site, reading it, discussing it, etc. But I want to make a step further: I want to pass other webmaster, to include some code, that would "import" news from my site and show in on theirs...

I did figure a solution, but it requires a PHP installed on other sites, and many don't have it.

Is there a solution with Javascript or something that is client-side?

I thank you in advance for any advices, suggestions or examples.

Regards, Twiggy

[Rohan_Hill]

You could do it with an <IFRAME> and have the contents of that on your server.

[twiggy]

Hey,

this just might be the right thing! Thanks! How about compatibility in variety of browsers? I've tested it in Opera 6.01, Mozilla 1.0 and IE6 ... and workd great ... is IFRAME supported in older brosers, such as Netscape 4.x+ or IE4, 5...?

And just one more question ... is it possible, on other pages, to have some sort of config parameters, to specify font size, color, maybe even their own css file, to blend my news to their page style ... so I'd make it unique and offer others to configure output for themselves ...

Thanks again.

Twiggy

[the_Igel]

As I remember, NS4 has <ILAYER> instead of <IFRAME>.

And, BTW, there's another way. You can generate news.js file like

document.write("<div>Here is something new!</div>");
document.write("<div>Here is something a bit older!</div>");
//etc...

and then anyone can put in his/her page:

<script src="http://www.yourserver.com/news.js"></script>

[Rodders]

The IFRAME itself can be sized and positioned differently for each website. If you want font colour and size to be customizable you'll need a smart solution. Here's my thoughts:

For each site that wants to use your news feed, you give them access to an admin section on your site. Basically, this will be a series of forms which allow them to choose font colors and sizes and layout which will then be built into a stylesheet.

So the DATA in the IFRAME could have the website ID tagged on the end...

DATA="http://www.yourwebsite.com/yournews.php?website=018839"

Your PHP script could look up the $_GET['website'] code in the style definitions table and retrieve all the customised styles. Then the PHP could build that into a stylesheet before getting onto the actually News Feed itself. You might want to include default styles for anything that isn't defined or if a site doesn't pass the 'website' in the URL.

You could make a more basic setup, where you ask build a CSS file according to their requirements. Your PHP could then just identify them and choose the correct CSS file.

[the_Igel]

I believe that most flexible solution is to generate .js file with an array of values

news = Array();
news[1] = Array('date' => '04/12/02', 'title' => 'Hello, here are news!', 'text' => 'We start our news line here');
news[2] = Array('date' => '05/12/02', 'title' => 'Hello, here are something else!', 'text' => 'We continue our news line here');
news[3] = Array('date' => '06/12/02', 'title' => 'Hello, here are oldies!', 'text' => 'We stop our news line here');

and just leave it for webmaster to generate html from these data. Of course, you should provide an example script.

It's like simulating loading external XML, but without XML 🙂