How can I pull in my BlogSpot page into a page on my web site

Question

I have a blog on BlogSpot.com, and I have a domain based on my own name. I want to have a URL on my site (like http://www.mydomain.com/blog) that will then pull in the content from my blog page, but I want the URL in the address bar to stay on http://www.mydomain.com/blog, so that it does not look like you left my site.

(I have a Windows hosting account on 1and1.com)

I did Google this question, and I found how a few things, like:

1: Adding a tag in to "refresh". Tried this, but it changes the address bar.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://myblog.blogspot.com" />

2: I also learned about the html iframe thing, but it has height and scrollbar issues.

3: Then, I found this partial code snippet, but I don't know what to do with it, or if it will even work against the BlogSpot server, or on my server:

<%
Set objHTTP = Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
objHTTP.Open "GET", "http://myblog.blogspot.com", false
objHTTP.Send
Response.Write objHTTP.ResponseText
%>

I am a client app guy, so this web stuff is all new to me.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The third option will probably work for the initial page load, but any links on the page will then direct the user to the BlogSpot page, and change the url. It simply fetches the page from blogspot, and then sends it to the user without any changes.

For me, the changing url is not a big deal, as long as it's easy for the user to get from one to the other easily; have prominent links on either page that tell the user where they go. Most people don't care about the url, they just care about the content.

Using an IFrame is probably your best bet. Many Facebook applications are in IFrames and still integrate very well.

Answer 2

Hey Matt,

I think using a regular frame or an iFrame is probably the easiest solution. What kind of scrollbar issues did you encounter? You can set custom values for some of these attributes, just check out the documentation here:

http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_iframe.asp

If you didn't want to use frames, you could actually proxy the entire page using a server side application like Squid. However, this is more difficult to setup, requires the ability to install software and configure firewall/iptable settings on your host, and must be configured properly to prevent malicious abuse.

-Mark

Answer 3

Here are some options you can try:

If you have PHP installed:

<?php
    echo file_get_contents('http://myblog.blogspot.com'); // or you can use fopen()
?>

Or Server-Side-Includes installed:

<!--# include virtual="http://myblog.blogspot.com" -->

Answer 4

You can also pull blog content from Blogspot using the Blogger Data API.

The advantage of this is that you can reformat and reorganize the content to match the style of your website. The disadvantage is that it's more work than an iframe, and you probably won't match the full functionality of Blogspot.

I'm playing with this now to see whether I can use Blogspot as a type of CMS for a club news system.