Increase Your Web Site Traffic -- Syndicate Your Web
Pages
By
William
Bontrager
Do you have a special web
page you think other webmasters would like to have on their sites?
If yes, Master Page Syndication Lite makes it possible to syndicate an entire
web page. And it's free. Download links are on the
demonstration
page.
It's actually quite easy to use. Instructions are in the README.txt file
that accompanies the download.
We've had a good number of requests for a script that can syndicate a web
page without resorting to the more powerful programs Master Syndicator or
Master Syndication Gateway I. (See
http://willmaster.com/a/19/pl.pl?msyn
and
http://willmaster.com/a/19/pl.pl?msg
for descriptions of those two alternate programs.)
Master Page Syndication Lite does the job quite nicely. The program extracts
the content from your web page, live. If you make changes to your page, every
remote syndicated page is changed, too, instantly.
The web page you are syndicating can be a static web page, or it can be a
script generated web page such as a blog or a database generated page.
In fact, any URL that delivers content to a browser can be syndicated with
Master Page Syndication Lite, except framed pages. For framed pages, the
URL of the content page must be syndicated, not the URL of the frameset
page.
Remote sites can publish the page either with JavaScript or with SSI.
To publish with JavaScript, the remote sites would put something like this
on their web page where they want your content to be published:
<script
language="JavaScript"
src="http://domain.com/cgi-bin/MasterPageSyndicatorLite.cgi">
</script>
To publish with SSI, the remote sites would first install a special short
CGI program into their cgi-bin (the program is included with the Master Page
Syndication Lite download), and then put something like this on their web
page where they want your content to be published:
<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/MPSLSSI.cgi"-->
The following can influence the decision to publish with JavaScript or with
SSI.
~~ JavaScript:
It's quicker to implement than the SSI method. Only
a small block of JavaScript code needs to be put on
the web page to publish the syndicated content.
Browsers with JavaScript disabled can not display
the content. Such browsers are probably a very
small percentage; the percentage may vary depending
on the site's visitor demographics.
I'm not a search engine specialist. However, I
assume that not all search engines index content
retrieved from a remote site via JavaScript.
~~ SSI:
It takes longer to implement than the JavaScript
method. A short CGI program (included with the
Master Page Syndication Lite download package) needs
to be installed on the remote site's server. And, an
SSI tag needs to be put on the web page where the
syndicated content will be published.
All browsers can display the content, no JavaScript
needed.
Search engines can index the content like they would
the content of static pages.
You, as the webmaster who is syndicating
a web page to other sites, can:
1. Syndicate your entire web page, including the HEAD
section, or syndicate only the BODY section.
A. Syndicating your entire web page, including the
HEAD section, will retain any CSS style sheets
you're using (the HREF of external style sheets
needs to be the absolute http://... URL), and
it will retain any =JavaScript in the HEAD area.
This means your formatting codes will be carried
over to the remote site's web page.
B. Syndicating only the BODY section allows the
remote site to use formatting codes consistent
with their site design. If you have JavaScript
in the HEAD section that must stay with the
syndicated content, move it to the point
immediately following the BODY tag.
2. Omit certain sections of your web page from the
syndicated content.
To omit a section, block it off with HTML comment
tags containing "no syndication" flags. This is how
to do it:
<!--BEGIN_NO_SYNDICATION-->
Content being omitted.
<!--END_NO_SYNDICATION-->
The content between the "no syndication" flags will
print on your web page but will not be syndicated
to remote web pages.
With Master Page Syndication Lite,
you can publish your web page with or without the HEAD section, and omit
any other parts of your web page that you do not want published on remote
sites. The remote syndication sites can publish your web page with either
JavaScript or SSI.
The demonstration page with download links is at
http://willmaster.com/a/19/pl.pl?demo199
Will Bontrager
About the Author:
William
Bontrager Programmer/Publisher, "WillMaster Possibilities"
ezine
mailto:possibilities@willmaster.com
Are you looking for top quality scripts? Visit
Willmaster
and check out his highly acclaimed Master Series scripts. Some free, some
for a fee.
Web
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