Hey everyone, how are you all doing?
I have some RSS feeds on my site that display various different streams of information. These are obviously accessible via RSS aggregators etc or if webmasters want to code something to access them.
I want to allow webmasters to download some simple php (or javascript) code that allows them to display data from my RSS feed on their site in a styled way. My intention is to have a standard display (say a colored box with a title and the three most recent RSS items displayed) that a webmaster can copy the code for and put it on their site, without having to really understand RSS or use a third party reader etc. To expand on this my intention would be to have some variables that a webmaster can choose (such as box color, number of RSS items etc) and then have the code generated accordingly.
The key to this is the code they copy being as short as possible so they don't have to copy streams of code and this is where my questions lies. What would be the standard way (or if no standard way a sensible way) of doing this? Obviously i can't use a third party rss reader on their site, i could just use php or something similar to fread the xml file and deal with the data acccordingly but this would involve relatively large amounts of code for them to copy which i am not keen on.
Another alternative seems to be to have a php file on my server which takes certain variables that they can just include on their site which seems to involve the least amount of code. One concern i have with this is that it will only work from php sites, although i suppose i could create an ASP and .js version of the file and give them the option of which include they want to use. Whilst minimising the code it feels like i may be causing some problems by having third parties including our files.
I would really, really appreciate any thoughts and advice anyone has on which (if any!) is a good way to go and which might cause me problems!
Thanks so much for your help as ever,
Dave
