Hi all. Some automotive websites autofeed other websites such as autotrader, compucars etc. How difficult would it be to stream the data to these sites and what is the format that is typically used to achieve this. Any answers much appreciated. Could this also be done as a bolt on package for existing PHP websites?
Hello Valley, I suspect that there is a master aggregator of these feeds and I would expect them to be made available in the form of XML feeds. This is a bad example, but Youtube is such an agrregator of videos, they have provided an xml feed to allow other sites to 'hook into' and then the other sites can display the videos surrounded by their own skin / website. You can even make interactions with the RSS feed http service like doing a search for example. If you found out someone who offers the feed that you need then you could quite easily use php to 'parse' the feed and display it on your site.
If you can find a site that offers the feeds, you shouldn't have any trouble finding sample code to implement it on your site. Check out http://www.programmableweb.com/ They list many of the APIs you can use to integrate with your site.