RSS remote service

[energylevel]

I have the opportunity to use a third party RSS feed service whereby articles will be specifically written at my request and for my site excursively, only issue I have is all files would have to be integrated into my site remotely i.e. they do NOT hand over the files and copy and let me use as I see fit.

I was wondering if there are disadvantages to this, as I see it the most obvious one is if their server goes down my site has no news feed!

[werty]

I would worry about making sure you are the only site that gets this content, the other thing to consider would be displaying this feed. You would want to parse the file server side, and not in javascript or else the search engines will not even know the content is there.

[bhartzer]

Ask them if you can cache their feed (i.e., grab it automatically once per hour, for example) and then post it on your site. Some sites do this and it takes a load off of the server that is serving the feed.

It would be better for them because it would take some of the load off their server while being better for you since you're assured that you won't ever not have anything to serve up on the page.

[energylevel]

thanks guys ... that's useful information....