Getting Started with ODP Data - Help!

Hi,

I am a relative newbie with ODP and would like to incorporate the full directory into my website. I would also like to customize the look and feel of the data, and perhaps add some additional attributes.

Can someone help with the pros/cons of the different ways of creating/maintaining the data?

There seems to be 3 schools of thought:

1) Import the data into a mysql db
2) Create html pages from the data
3) Incorporate a live feed from ODP

Can each of these methods allow for customized look and feel?

Any help is appreciated,

Nici

If you suspect that your site will have more than a hand full of visitors, please don't use 3, because it puts additional load on the ODP server (which in fact are only slighty more up to date than the RDF file, do you don't win that much this way). In the past the ODP staff did block sites that caused to much traffic.

Regarding 1 and 2 it depends on what else you want to do on your site. Do you have changing contents on every page? Are you changing your templates frequently? Then you definitely should go for a database solution like mysql.

Do you have lots of visitors slowing down your machine but can't afford a large server park? You might consider reducing server load by doing approach 2. But it starts to be an alternative if the number of page views reaches the number of pages yu have to pregenerate, so we're talking about _lots_ of visitors ;-)

And of course you can do your own look and feel, as long as you add the proper contribution (See the DMOZ help section for more details.