Hi All

I am wondering how do you get a website to search other websites and 'lift' material from them? I believe you call it a mash-up website. i.e lets say you were building a site that advertised turtles for sale - and you wanted to display not just your own ads but other ads posted by other users on other websites as well?

Further, does anyone know a good scipt that is a bit like BEBO i.e users can join with username and password and upload their own page with photos etc.

Any help appreciated

Seb.

What you are describing could be a violation of copyright law depending on how you use it, so be careful, but you can retrieve data from other websites by making HTTP requests, either server-side or clientside.

Serverside (ASP example):

on error resume next
set xmlhttp=Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
xmlhttp.open "GET","http://www.google.com/",false,"",""
xmlhttp.send
if err.number=0 and xmlhttp.status=200 then
   data=xmlhttp.responsetext
end if

Clientside (Javascript example):

if (document.all) var req=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
else var req=new XMLHttpRequest();
req.onreadystatechange=funcProcess;  //  funcProcess() will process the result
req.open('GET','http://www.google.com/',true);