As seen on pages like http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-charts/ I'd like a widget of the recent forum topics to display on my site and code to offer supporters to include this kind of widget on their website or blog. My forums are vBulletin. How do I do it?
u can use feedburner for a similar javascript it is difficult to do it like you mentiond >> pure html
Do it by grabbing the RSS feed for your forum, but make sure you aren't doing it dynamically every time you want to display it. A good idea would be to grab it and cache it for 10 minutes, only requesting the live RSS feed if the previous one you got is more than 10 minutes old. This will prevent you from wrecking your forum with RSS feed requests if the external site gets a lot of traffic. That's the *easy* way to do it... The way *I* do it is I push out a new HTML blob (the box you see) to a memcached server whenever (and only when) it needs to be updated (new thread create, deleted, moved, etc.) by using the plug-in system at 5 different locations that makes a shell script call (split into it's own process so it doesn't slow down the user) like so: exec ("/usr/local/bin/php " . CWD . "/mycustomfile.php >/dev/null &"); PHP: Blah, blah, blah... If you don't have memcached server(s) available for your setup, best to just do the caching RSS system.
Use this modification at vbulletin.org, its uses "carp" which is a free rss script. http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=163718 I'am using it on my forum and it works pretty good.