ok so i have a large number of sites.... across a number of different platforms
(static html -

PHP

  -

PHP

  +MYsql -

Asp

 

and i want one central solution to allow me to distribute links out to any of these sites so i dont end up killing the sites performance

suggestions please! 

I would assume they are on different servers.

The static HTML sites you are probably screwed on.

There are two choices really.
Connect directly to the database from each website. Least overhead, but least manageable. means that if you ever want to change the output, you gotta edit every occurrence.
or
Webservice. The ghetto version would be REST query to a single management

mac

 hine. You would request a link like domain.com?phrase=somephrase&num=2&classname=someuniqueclassnameforCSS or something like that. Then your server would just reply back with an already formatted link, that you would just Write straight out to the page. No XML parsing. No crazy shit, unless you want to. Obviously each platform would need its own version of the Linker script. But if you ever want to change the resulting links, or you want to turn it off, you just do it all at the webservice. If you go this approach, I suggesting passing as much stuff as you can possibly ever think you will need in that URL. because if you decide in the future that you might need something else... you gotta edit every single occurrence, and depending on how you are set up, that could suck bad.

I did this and passed, referrer,domainname,agent,ip,landingURL,phrase. That way you can even do cloaking of the links from the webservice side Oh its google! I'd better show links. oh its human? Id better show some bullshit like google search suggestions...

yup thanks nb  - ill do some tests

always tests

yawn.....

just to add. if you go the webservice approach, you would still have to do a little bit of code on each site, but it will be MUCH smaller. collect parameters, open connection to webservice server, echo whatever comes back. thats it.

Not sure if this helps, but the Zend library has some decent classes to act as a web services, xmlrpc, REST, or JSON iirc.

DM

A different thought would be to have a centralized db that contained the current links you want distributed, then have the remote sites call home say, once a day, grab the link info and rebuild the local pages. I did this with a little project I called the "istributed Press Release Archive Cooperative" it was an amazing service that archived press releases among cooperatively interlinked sites all over the world - sometimes if you searched just right you might find that the press releases were ... ahm... enriched towards a certain keyword phrase. : But the point was that they all called home to find out what they needed to enrich with. I handled lots and lots of sites because they all called home on a different schedule, and the press releases and enrichment went out in a nice balanced 24-hour-a-day way.

And yes, for those that have been following along, this *might* have been how a certain NY legal firm found themselves coming up in the top 10 for certain ... shall we say ... sexually exotic keyword phrases 

If you place just a little bit of

PHP

  code out with the site, you could rebuild them, regardless of staticness pretty easily. Leave a marker or two in the page, pull out what's between the markers, add <something new> then re-write the file and poof, you're all done. Pretty durn easy actually.

Hmmmmm stop it Perk your making me think and thats never a good thing....

Seriously - thanks though

Sorry I'm late   Kids.....sucking the life out of me 

There's a company call ZMTC that buys links on a slew of my WH sites.  They sent me some code for a bunch of languages (

ASP

 ,

ASP

 

.net

 ,

PHP

  and basically they check home every hour, get links, store them in a file.  Code needed serious tweaking for high traffic sites though...

For my high traffic sites I use

.net

  caching and use a cache variable to specify the file is being loaded so 5 threads don't load it at once when the cache is empty.  For the threads that do see an empty cache and the file isn't loaded just don't show it.