Help Me Finish The Idea...

[boomers]

Heya folks...

Ive recently made a handy little script in asp.net that im wanting to expand on, but due to lack of knowledge/experience I really dont know how to take this forward.

My script collects news headlines from around the internet and lists for the user/visitor to view, the headlines are all linked to their original source so if someone clicks on one of the headlines then they are taken to the news item.

What I want is to make this a publically available service to webmasters... so a webmaster could signup to my site, pick a 'genre' of news and then be given some copy/paste code to add to their site which will then use my script to automatically look for and link to news items.

Basically though I have nnnnooooooooo idea how I should be going about this, my only idea was to have my script update an XML file with the info of the news items... and then have a copy/paste piece of javascript that would read and display the info from the XML file.

How feasible is this option... is it something thats possible to do? Also does anyone else have a different theory on how to allow other webmasters use this service Ive made?

 

[Peter]

Your idea is probably the best way to achieve it. You could either create the xml directly from the asp page (so that it displays the most upto date news) or you could for example use cron to update an xml file say every 10 minutes.

The advantage of the second is that if you are expecting alot of traffic then it will keep server resource usage fairly low.

Presumably you are storing the news feeds information in a database rather than wanting to retrieve them every time someone seeks the information. If you are doing the latter I suggest changing it to storing it yourself as the network will cause a huge bottle neck in your system.

I am not familiar with asp so am not familiar how to go about it 100% but if it is anything like php 5 it should be quite a simple task.

 

[gauravmm]

If your site is very busy, with hundreds of database queries a minute, you could attempt to write a script that will save the XML every 10 minutes. This would be better for your database than an access every time someone refreshes the page.
The downside is that news is not instantly updated.