dynamic headline help
I have a web page for a client that they would like to populate dynamically
with the headline from another website (also owned by the same co., but hosted
by another provider, maintained by another developer, etc.). For instance,
let's say my client wants the current headline from abcnews.com to show up
in a certain cell in a certain table on their home page.
What they DON'T want is to hit that page every time someone wants the headline
(fear of slowing down both servers). They want a script (or batch job, or
something) that will go out every day, say at 2AM, grab that headline from
the other division's website, populate their website, and go to sleep until
the following morning. They don't want to have to get involved at all.
One potential idea is to have a batch job that goes out at the hypothetical
2AM, pulls the headline, writes it to a flat file...them my home page pulls
that info and populates the table with it each time someone loads it up.
Would this be incredibly slow? I'm guessing about 20,000 hits/day.
My client is on an NT4 server running IIS...I can use any server or client
side scripting engine...the server is hosted remotely (by Interland).
Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am not even sure
where to start with all the limitations they've given me.
Thanks in advance.
Tracey
[1466 byte] By [
Tracey] at [2007-11-9 15:36:11]
# 1 Re: dynamic headline help
It wouldn't be any slower than reading some other file off the server. I
don't think you should be worried about the performance after you've gotten
the headline, I would be worried about getting the headline. That requires
an HTTP request to [headlinesite].com, which isn't really a big deal if you
have a good HTTP component. But then you have to parse through the HTML and
grab the headline out. This is not fun; and what happens when their format
changes? Run a Search on HTML and Screen Scraping to see just what a mess
this can turn into.
- Ryan
"Tracey" <traceyc@rocketmail.com> wrote in message
news:39665a5e$1@news.dev-archive.com...
>
> I have a web page for a client that they would like to populate
dynamically
> with the headline from another website (also owned by the same co., but
hosted
> by another provider, maintained by another developer, etc.). For
instance,
> let's say my client wants the current headline from abcnews.com to show up
> in a certain cell in a certain table on their home page.
>
> What they DON'T want is to hit that page every time someone wants the
headline
> (fear of slowing down both servers). They want a script (or batch job, or
> something) that will go out every day, say at 2AM, grab that headline from
> the other division's website, populate their website, and go to sleep
until
> the following morning. They don't want to have to get involved at all.
>
>
> One potential idea is to have a batch job that goes out at the
hypothetical
> 2AM, pulls the headline, writes it to a flat file...them my home page
pulls
> that info and populates the table with it each time someone loads it up.
> Would this be incredibly slow? I'm guessing about 20,000 hits/day.
>
> My client is on an NT4 server running IIS...I can use any server or client
> side scripting engine...the server is hosted remotely (by Interland).
>
> Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am not even sure
> where to start with all the limitations they've given me.
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Tracey
