I've been looking for a solution for this idea for a long time and continue to come up empty so I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction or offer a good suggestion.

I maintain a large family website (over 250 people in the online directory) that displays family statistics and news and a full directory with photos and data for the living family. I use a Google calendar to display birthday's and anniversaries and that all looks and works great.

What I always wanted to do was display a scrolling "ticker" type display on the main page that is able to look at an external file (TXT or XML or ?) and display the current birthdays or anniversaries in a date range of maybe 2 or 3 days based on the current system date. In other words I would build an external file (or export from the Google Calendar) a list of dates and events and have the scroller display ONLY the pertinent events based on date.

I'm finding tons of javascript and flash utilties that do news scrollers, but few of them provide the option of pointing to an external file for the data and most importantly I'm finding NONE that is able to read in the critical date so I don't have to constantly update the website to make it reflect the current events. As I add new birthdays and anniversaries, I would just update the TXT or XML file and not have to touch the website code.

Does that make sense? Does Coffee Cup have something that can do this or can you point me to something that does? I appreciate any help or suggestions...

...Kevin Horton