Syndicating your website content

Content is visitor bait. If you post something sufficiently entertaining, useful or informative on your website, you'll attract visitors. But there is an alternative to just uploading your work and waiting for people to sniff it out. You can send your content out hunting by putting it on other websites. Capture the reader's interest and they'll click through to your site. Even if they don't visit you, you build your reputation each time your work and your name are seen.

This page provides some scripts you can adapt to start syndicating your content to other sites. Put your cursor in the form field with the script, select all, copy and then paste it into your webpage.

Syndicating images

If you're syndicating image files, the easiest thing is to just get people to link to a picture on your site directly. Here's some example code that will take the image cartoon.gif from your site (www.example.com) and embed it in the host page.

When you want to change the cartoon, just upload a new version of cartoon.gif. This link works on any browser that has images switched on, but it does mean that you'll have to upload a new file each day if you want to publish a daily comic strip.

Using Javascript to automate the selection

Javascript offers a good alternative, both because Javascript files on other sites can be linked as easily as images can, and because they offer some intelligence to save you time. The code below will show a cartoon numbered for the day of the week so that on the 12th, it will show cartoon12.gif and so on.

Using that script means you only need to update your cartoons once a month, and you can do it any time in the month too.

As that script shows, Document.write is used to get Javascript to insert some HTML in the page. The script above works by inserting the default image (cartoon0.gif) and giving it a name, working out the day number in the month, and then replacing cartoon0.gif with the file that has the name "cartoon" plus the date number plus ".gif". If you wanted to let other webmasters use this to host your pictures, you'd need to add your website address and the full path to the images before each mention of "cartoon".

Self-updating syndication code

Using the previous script, you need to get all the webmasters to update their site if you have to change something about the code. There's a better way. You can put just the Javascript (trim off the <script> tags) in a file with the extension .js (we'll call it syndicate.js) and get webmasters to link to it like this:

Here's how it works:

• You create a Javascript file that writes your HTML to the page using document.write commands
• You give this file the extension .js (it can have any name, in my example, it's syndicate.js)
• You then invite webmasters to link to this Javascript using the code above
• Each time their page is viewed, it will call up syndicate.js from your server and run it
• Because that Javascript does the job of writing your HTML into the page, it means that effectively you're pasting your HTML into someone else's page in a roundabout way.

The beauty of it is that you can change the syndicate.js code at any time and the next time someone views any webpage calling it, that webpage too will change. So if you link lots of webpages (perhaps many of which you don't own) to the same syndicate.js file, you have a way to update all of these separate pages all over the internet by changing just one file that you control (syndicate.js).

It's much more flexible than our previous daily cartoon example. If you need to alter the path or size of your images, just update your syndicate.js file. You host sites won't even notice the difference, let alone have to update their code.

You can use the same technique to send any HTML code to another website. Just put your HTML inside document.write() code. You need to take care with quotes, because Javascript can think that you're telling it you've finished your document.write when you're using an apostrophe. Javascript uses a leading \ before apostrophes or HTML quotes to avoid confusion, like this:

<strong>Don't let apostrophes confuse</strong>

would become:

document.write('<strong>Don\'t let apostrophes confuse</strong>');

Don't panic though - there's a free Javascript include file creator on this site.

Random tip Javascript

If you're sending short articles to other sites, you can use a similar a trick to our daily image trick above. You can send them all in the same Javascript file (so they must be short!) and then get Javascript to pick one to display.

You store your advice in arrays (we're calling them 'quote' here) and get Javascript to show a random one. Here's the bare bones of the code:

Just add new quotes in turn, increasing the number in square brackets.

Daily quote Javascript

This mutant hybrid of our two scripts will show a daily quote:

Dress it up by getting Javascript to insert HTML formatting, write some more useful advice and put it in a .js file and you're ready to syndicate your ideas all over the web.

Related links

• Javascript include file creator - takes the hard work out of making Javascript syndication files
• Javascript Smart Marketing Toolkit - make your site more responsive with these tools for managing cookies, reacting to times and dates and cycling banner adverts
• Free navigation Javascripts - menus, keypress control and more using a dash of Javascript
• Javascript delay / wait / pause script - want to set something to happen after a delay or want to pause the program? See this concise guide and naughty script.