You can use PHPCOW to get the same basic effect that their MyWeb program allows.......you simply create RSS feeds from a variety of news sources or informational sites....create an RSS feed and block for the source, and post it into a template.
Little things like this are often overlooked, but i wanted to get the ball rolling in this forumn, because there is a lot of different and creative things you can do with PHPCOW.
Very true, look at my site, its nearly all rss feeds with little articles. I also use the custom google search to increase some revenue with that.
I guess PHPCow's RSS import doesn't have the possibility of displaying the image wherever available in feeds. Not sure though. Using too many remote feeds on template causes site slowdown for sure so we always recommend using bare min of external feeds on any given template.
MyWeb if you click on given link, it does take you to detailed window where images associated with story are displayed if available in feed.
yes, thats very true....we experienced a slowdown when we had 7-8 RSS feeds, but that was a long time ago, they have since patched that issue.....so maybe it would work better now.
Speaking of RSS Feeds, it would be nice to have a caching feature so you could decide how often it updated the RSS feeds....which may cut down on the server load.
Remote RSS Feeds really don't cause load issues directly. It only causes a slowdown. Slowdown cases alive http connections build up and that causes the actual loading of server.
Building cache is again a resource intensive process and io am sure you would know this since you are running a VB forum which has some cache refresh stuff like many other commercial forums scripts. IPB has and they have recommendations on cache rebuild also.
If too many Remote feeds become impossible to live without, then setup a cron job to get the remote xml file and store on your server and use them in the RSS Blocks. This would eliminate external variable completely as RSS blocks would be taking everything stored locally on filesystem.
I don't really have an issue with my multiple feeds. As for displaying images, they can do it if you go out far enough with the characters you want since most images are in their own tag. kind of annoying but it works. As for making a cron job to handle the rss feeds...I'm no coder, thats way above my skills