Re: How to syndicate articles?

["wkearney99" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

> Is there a way to syndicate articles, such that they will always 
> appear within the "look and feel" of the sites, even when a
> link is 
> followed to another article?

Sure, but you're going to have to do some work.

You could give each subscribing site their own lead-in URL to your 
locally stored articles.  Use that inbound URL to display the 
article.  You'd have to keep a locally stored copy of their site 
templating to make this work in a visually compatible fashion.  This 
would be a real pain in the ass to keep current.  You'd have to 
constantly keep your local templates 'in sync' with the referring 
site. 

You could keep your content locally and have their servers use server-
side processing to go grab your content, put it in their HTML and 
then push it to the clients.  This is a problem in that it would 
require the server to do all the processing.  Doing it in per-page 
view server-side pages would drag a copy from your site, into their 
site, process it and then push it back out as HTML.  Really too much 
work and wasted bandwidth.  They could grab your content and keep it 
cached locally but they'd have to make some efforts to be sure their 
local copy was 'fresh'.

The servers could also put browser-side code into their pages that 
would have the client do all the work.  The client would have to pull 
your content from your site and then integrate it into the page.  The 
hassle here is that the server would have to keep a ton of browser-
specific alternatives for that code.  Again, a real pain in the ass.

The short answer?  Put your content into the subscriber server and be 
done with it.  While what you want to do is technically feasible, the 
state of servers, browsers and network reliability make this just too 
fragile to implement reliably.  Well, not without paying beaucoup 
dinero to people like akmai...

-Bill Kearney