Display result of slow script after page loads

On my website, http://www.diabetesdaily.com, we have a script that aggregates content from a few dozen blogs. Every fifteen minutes, there's a pageload that takes about 15 seconds as the script deletes the cached RSS files and queries the new ones. I need to improve this and I have a few ideas but no clue how to implement them. There are two ways I can think of to improve this:

Method 1: Somehow display a "Loading Content" icon until the script is done running and then replace it with the actual content

Method 2: Run the script via a cron job every 15 minutes, somehow create a static file and include the static file

Is either these the right way to go? I'm a self-taught novice but I can get along well enough if you can offer a brief overview of what's necessary to accomplish this. I've had no luck trying to Google such a vague topic. :)

Thank you!

On my website, http://www.diabetesdaily.com, we have a script that aggregates content from a few dozen blogs. Every fifteen minutes, there's a pageload that takes about 15 seconds as the script deletes the cached RSS files and queries the new ones. I need to improve this and I have a few ideas but no clue how to implement them. There are two ways I can think of to improve this:

Method 1: Somehow display a "Loading Content" icon until the script is done running and then replace it with the actual content

Method 2: Run the script via a cron job every 15 minutes, somehow create a static file and include the static file

Is either these the right way to go? I'm a self-taught novice but I can get along well enough if you can offer a brief overview of what's necessary to accomplish this. I've had no luck trying to Google such a vague topic. :)

Thank you!

For Method 2, you'd have to create the cron job on the server, in the shell. Of course Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron_job) has an article on them.
I think you'd have to do method 1 with Javascript because PHP is just for displaying the page, once it displays it execution stops. Maybe output buffering (search PHP.net) can help you?

Method 2 is the way to go. crontab is pretty simple and generating static files has the added advantage of letting apache serve 'not modified' headers and saving you bandwidth.

edit: yeah, also, output buffering will make method 2 pretty easy:

ob_start();
// your old dynamic page
file_put_contents('static.xml', ob_get_contents());

You may need a bit more logic to determine the static filename, but that's basically the idea.

Thanks for the advice - I had a feeling there was a simple way to do it if I could only figure out the function! I'm going to try method two this weekend. I'll let you know how it turns out.

AWESOME! Ralph, your advice worked beautifully. Because I'm using PHP 4.1.x, I used the fopen, fwrite, and fclose sequence to make it happen. But it works. Now, I'm moving all of my RSS-processing scripts to their own static files and it's already having a dramatic effect.

Best wishes,
David