a script for press releases

An in-depth look into how it really works

[broniusm]

There is a press release service out there that uses a script called "example.pl". Basically, a website (xyz.com) will have a link to its "news articles" which shows a list of news articles pertaining to the given company. The link to the script (from the "news" link) passes in the company identifier to this third party web app which then actually leaves the xyz.com domain but still shows the original xyz.com banner, menu, and footer surrounding the list of articles. All links in the xyz.com style are absolute and point back to xyz.com's site, and all article links continue to point to this third party news app site. Clicking on an article acts the same but instead of the list of articles it has, of course, the body of the article.

How do you suppose such a service achieves this mix & match and seamless cross-linking? Does the news service have a db of "latest xyz.com page snippets"? I wouldn't be so confused if it all stayed on xyz.com, but it's actually navigating away to the third party news service.

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:03 pm (utc) on Aug. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] generalized script name [/edit]

[jatar_k]

it seems like a news aggregator

[broniusm]

From my understanding of news aggregators, they collect news articles and make them available either on or via their site. Either way, though, you'd see the domain name of the machine hosting the script.

My question is how is it managed that the news service would be able to pump both the news and the xyz.com template back to the user, both from the news service's domain name? Maybe it's a fooled header to keep links alive and xyz.com in fact is consuming and pushing the news afterall?..

[jatar_k]

could be that it is using something like curl to grab the info and rewriting the urls as it goes.

[broniusm]

curl... interesting
Thanks for the tip-- I don't think I'll really get an authoritative answer to my original question, but I appreciate your input which has led me to a slick new module to toy with!

cheers