[noppid]

I would suggest you use curl. You can put the hook in global and store the response in a variable after ya process it. Put that variable in the footer template and you're all set.

The advantage is, curl will sort out the socket, the headers, the responses for you. You can set a timeout and do different things if you don't get the response fast enough.

So here's a piece of code I have shared before to do about the same thing, fetch remote data from a website to integrate with vBulletin.

PHP Code:

ob_start();
// set the url
$cf_url = 'http://www.example.com/?website_id=xxx';
// wait x seconds if no connection, fail and move on.
$cf_timeout = 1;
// inits
$cf_data = '';
$cf_gotdata = true;
// set up curl
$cf_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $cf_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $cf_url );
curl_setopt( $cf_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $cf_timeout );
curl_setopt( $cf_handle, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
curl_setopt( $cf_handle, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true );
curl_setopt( $cf_handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false );
curl_setopt( $cf_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
$cf_data = curl_exec( $cf_handle );
if (curl_errno($cf_handle)) 
{
   $cf_gotdata = false; 
}
curl_close( $cf_handle );
if ( $cf_data != '' && $cf_gotdata )
{
    // display the ads for capture and/or process fetched data
    echo $cf_data;
}
else
{
    // do stuff here if no data fetched
}
unset($cf_data);
unset($cf_handle);
unset($cf_timeout);
unset($cf_gotdata);
echo '<br />';
// put $cf_data in the footer template where you want the returned data displayed.
$cf_data = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();