Offering syndication to others

Section at a glance
The concept
   Who can use it?
Doing it using PHP
   What the source code will look like
Doing it using Javascript
   What the source code will look like
Conditions of use/our promises
> Offering your own syndicate material to others
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Offering your own material

Syndication is a good way to share content, and has advantages over merely linking to a page. The material is directly incorporated into the user's own site, and site visitors may be unaware of its source.

It can be used for material which changes every day, such as a devotional, quotation, joke, or cartoon. It is equally useful in sharing static unchanging content. There is great potential for offering Christian resource material such as this. It is also useful to offer syndicate material such as:

ready-made testimonies and gospel presentations to insert in evangelistic sites and church pages
apologetics and teaching material for church and resource sites
ready-made children's or teen pages for church sites

Few churches might have the time and resources to create a large range of such pages, but using syndication, they can build a site which can offer quality material directly within their pages. Several major ministries are planning to offer a range of resource pages by syndication. It is a useful option of sharing resources for the Kingdom, and we hope that many others will see the potential for offering their material in this way.

Our site offers several pages for syndication:
Web Evangelism Guide | Church Page Guide | Needs-based Evangelism.

Implementing it
The easiest way is to do it using Javascript. 95% of site visitors can view it, and if you offer a <NOSCRIPT> text with a link to the material on your own site, then these 5% will get it too.

The principle is very easy. You convert an HTML file to Javascript by:

escaping every apostrophe in the text with a preceding backslash, e.g. they\'ve
adding document.writeln(' to the begining of every new line in the file, and '); to every line-end
Add  on a line of its own at the end
save the file with a .js suffix and provide the URL of the file for people to insert in their own page in the form, e.g.

<script language="javascript" src="http://www.yoursite/filename.js">
</script>
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/filename.html">Page Title<</a><br>
Page description within noscript tags is only visible for users without Javascript-enabled browsers
</noscript>
Graphics can be included in the file, but must use absolute URLs
Some but not all Javascripts will work within the Javascript file - coded as <sc"+"ript>

There is online conversion tool which will add the backslashes and extra coding for each line. (You must add your own coding to the very top and end of the file.)

Purple Pages and Katsuey Design give more information on how to use Javascript for syndication.

Other options

There are several alternatives. Users with PHP pages can insert content with a PHP insertion code. Note however that, unlike Javascript, the content is hard-coded into the page and is viewable by a search engine spider. Search engines do not like to see near-identical material at different domains and may penalize sites that do this. This is a strong argument for sticking to Javascript.

Another option is for people to use an inline frame with a link to your page. Because the frame must have a specified size, it seems to work best as short item in a right or left-hand margin. Providing that your page is shorter than the size of the frame, no scrollbars will appear. This is the code used on one of our pages (which actually links to a javascript-generated syndicate page which we could not link to directly because it is already within a javascript-generated page):
<iframe src="http://www.gospelcom.net/guide/mypage/smallpage1.html" width="220" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" align="right">
If you enclose your target page in a CSS-generated border, it will set the contents off nicely. However, browser font sizing may affect the way inline frames appear.

CSS also has its own little-known facility for inserting content from another page within a div box which scrolls if necessary.

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