“When you want to announce changes in your project to
several Web sites, you go to the first one and fill in a form with
your new info. Then you go to the next one and do it again. And
again with the next one. And again. And again. Doc O’Leary thinks
he has a solution. Please read to the bottom for my comments
and a couple of questions I’d like to ask everyone.”
“In the (good ol’) days when FTP and archie were king, it was
fairly simple for developers to spread their offerings far and
wide. I had scripts set up to drop the right files in the right
locations, and it didn’t much matter if there were two or twenty
archives.”
“Enter the Web, and the focus shifts from pushing software out
to archives in favor of pulling people into Web sites. I think
that’s a good thing, because it puts more information into the
users’ hands, but in the process, developers have lost the ability
to easily push anything out. Instead, we have to manually go to a
number of tracking sites (the more the better, usually), set up
accounts, and edit essentially the same information on all those
sites.”
“My long-winded question is essentially this: Is there any
interest in automating this process? I currently have a property
list (easily made available in plist or XML format (and simple to
convert to other formats, if necessary)) I can use to build the
dynamic pages of my site which contains all or nearly all the
information that is gathered at various software tracking sites. If
a general software description file format can be agreed on, simply
making that file available would give sites all the information
they need to update their database entries. No fuss, no muss.
Minimizing the administrative efforts will really lower the barrier
of entry for all sites.”