I'm having trouble working out the best way to do this:
I want to have a short piece of code webmasters can use to embed some information from a database on my site, I can easily knock up an asp page that displays the data required but how do I get that onto someone elses website. I thought about an Iframe but there has to be a better way.

Can anyone point me toward a possible solution?

Is the "other" site also asp?

No not necessarily, the idea is any other site/sites can embed the data. I'll give an example to illustrate in more detail:

I have a webpage with some content on it, a short piece of code is presented in a box so any webmasters can embed the data in there own pages (a bit like youtube) the embed code shows condensed data which is linked to the full page.

This is simple with an image or static text but the data is changed regularly and so has to be generated dynamically from a database. I can put together an ASP webpage to show the condensed version of data, all I need is a way to embed this into any other webpage.

Looking for something simple and SEO friendly so search engines can see the data and I can benefit from the link. That's why an Iframe is no good

Then all you can do is make the data available via a URL, either as a XML feed or a HTML page (or both). Include a link to the URL on your site where the same content can be read in the context of your site.

It is up to the data consumer exactly how it will be embedded in their page, you cannot control that.

Forget about the SEO aspect and consider the far more important marketing aspect.

For what you are asking about even iframes are NOT a problem as the page will be indexed on your site rather than on a third party site, which may have more "importance" than your site and therefore your page on another site may well end up filtering out your page on your site.

Iframes are only a problem when putting your own content on your own site.

Compromises:
- You can put your link outside the iframe, the iframe allows dynamic generation from your server and the link above or below the iframe gives you SE credit for being linked (but they can remove this link when pasting if they want to be mean)
- You can use a dynamically generated javascript file. They would paste code like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yoursite.com/yourjs.asp"></script>

The .asp allows you to generate the data dynamically, or you could use .js and set up your web server to process .js files through the php engine.
- You could use a server-side script that runs periodically (once an hour or something), which writes your data (using the FileSystemObject) to a static .js file which then document.writes out the data, and have them include that .js file

Umm that's all I can think of

If you know the foreign server is up to it, you could make a web service that will fetch the actual html you generate and then write it out on its page while the page is being generated. That wouldn't work if I wanted to use your content in a wp blog ... iframes are probably your best bet here.

Thanks guys, I had a dig about on the net and the only other way I can find would be embed object (this is what youtube use) would this be better or worse than an Iframe?

You should probably use AJAX to link to the database, this way the page can refresh the data periodically without having to refresh the page. If you are not familiar with AJAX, get familiar... It looks scary but try it when you "get" it, you will be amazed how simple and powerful it is. 20 minutes should make you an expert.