Implementing news headlines on my site

without using javascript or showing outbound links

[Oaf357]

Okay. I want to add 3 to 5 headlines in a column with a width of 200. I don't want to use JavaScript to do this either and don't want a link to someone else's site on my home page. Got any suggestions?

[heini]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Did you look into Iframes?

[chiyo]

If you dont want to link and dont want to pay Im assuming you will be creating your own content and feeds?

If so heini is right. You can use iframes, or you can use a cell in a table fed by SSI or PHP includes. Then just update your news headlines either manually or by a script.

[Oaf357]

I haven't looked into to iframes and would significantly favor a PHP include.

I won't be generating the news myself, it would be world news headlines.

The link isn't such a huge issue. Take for example Moreover's JavaScript news feed. Works great but the link draws to much attention to itself. The home page of my site is designed to be an entrance of sorts to the rest of the site, not someone else's.

[edited by: Oaf357 at 4:53 pm (utc) on Mar. 6, 2003]

[PaulPaul]

Why wouldnt you want to link to the full story?

Please dont say for fear of PR loss..

[Oaf357]

Linking to the story is no issue. I'd set that up with a target of _blank. It's the linking to the provider of the news that I'd like some control over. A link would definitely be given to the writer of the script or service, should it be necessary. I would write a PHP script to pull from Moreover's XML based feeds but my knowledge of PHP is quite limited.

[heini]

In all honesty, that does not sound like a fair deal to me ;)
Additionally I as a user would not be amused to see a news feed which is not clickable.

<added> ok, scratch the second part, was typing while you posted</added>

[Oaf357]

LOL ok.

How is it not a fair deal? What pay sites are available? There are PHP scripts out there that do kinda what I want to do but you can't control the number of headlines, its all or nothing.

[ricfink]

I wrote a script that automatically downloads some pages, strips away everything but the headline and short summary.(that's how the pages are constructed to begin with. there's no way to script a summary?)

It's a big job. No shortcuts.
No simple easy way to do this that I can see.

[Oaf357]

But isn't there a way to set up that exact same script to only display the first 5 headlines?

[ricfink]

oh yeah. I did that, too. The first three headlines appear on the homepage as an insert. They're links to the main newspage. Goes into a separate page. It's implemented as an iframe within a table cell on the homepage.

The cell just clips the iframe - the script measures the length of the headlines and if one is too long to fit without a word wrap, it moves to the next one on the list until there's three that fit.

It's a fairly complicated and lengthy script as these things go. It's all text processing.

[chiyo]

Just a heads up from some of the RSS developer maillists I belong to. It seems that Moreover is re-considering allowing websites to use their "free" RSS or other format feeds.

Yep, its a trade off. Moreover or other news services are letting you use their news gathering services in return for branding. So its understandable they want their feeds and branding to stand out! Also look at the fine print. If the service is anyway smart they will disallow any non-cosmetic tweaking to the way the script is displayed in their TOS. If you become a problem they can sue you or far more likely, just ban your server from accessing their scripts directly.