Announcing the first release of Pagecast, a tool written in Python to aid in submitting (potentially large) lists of URL's to search engine spiders such as AltaVista, Hotbot, Excite, etc. See http://askpreston.com/projects/pagecast/index.html for more information. Pagecast is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Summary -- Pagecast can run from either the command line or as a mail robot. It is easily configured via .conf files. The basic action is to take a line-separated list of URL's from a file, standard input, or the body of a mail message and submit these URL's in a multithreaded fashion to a variety of Internet search engines. Essentially, it automates the "suggest a site" procedure offered by most search engines. Pagecast 1.0 comes pre-configured with 6 popular search engines (Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, AltaVista, Google, and Lycos.) It is relatively easy to add additional search engines without delving into the actual Python code. There are some 'advanced' features such as the ability to download and scan the URLs for outdated date meta tags or low keyword-to-title relevence. These features could use some refinement. This software is distributed under the GPL. I hope someone finds it useful and perhaps contributes to its further development. I will make bug-fix releases as neccesary, however, I am not actively working on it at the moment having more exciting Python projects in the works. At any rate, I would love to hear anybody's comments. Sincerely, Preston Landers planders@mail.utexas.edu <P><A HREF="http://askpreston.com/projects/pagecast/index.html">Pagecast 1.0</A> - submit lists of URLs to search engine spiders. (02-Jul-99) -- ----------- comp.lang.python.announce (moderated) ---------- Article Submission Address: python-announce@python.org Python Language Home Page: http://www.python.org/ Python Quick Help Index: http://www.python.org/Help.html ------------------------------------------------------------