Welcome to the homepage of Pagecast, a program that makes it easy to send lists of URLs to popular internet search engine services. Pagecast is Free Software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.
5/21/2000 -- New!! Pagecast 2.0.0 released. See details below.
The development homepage for Pagecast is hosted by my friends at SourceForge.net. You can find all the latest development information, including CVS checkouts of Pagecast, the new mailing list, and documentation.
Visit the Pagecast Project Page @ SourceForge.net for the latest information and instructions on obtaining a CVS checkout of Pagecast. New! Nightly tarballs of the CVS *root* are availible. These are tarballs of the repository, not a checkout; you will still need CVS installed to really use these.
The page you are looking at now is probably Pagecast.SourceForge.net though there is also a backup site at: pbl.cx/pagecast
Pagecast 2.0.0 (the current stable release) was released on May 21st, 2000.
Pagecast makes it easy to submit lists of URLs -- Uniform Resource Locators, such as http://pbl.cx/pagecast/index.html -- to Internet search engines. (Supported Search Engines List) It also has some more advanced features such as the ability to check the URL's for some problematic conditions. It is designed to be simple to use and effective at what it does.
Pagecast is a program that can be run from either the command line or as a mail-robot. It was developed and tested on a Linux system, and should run on any Unix-like system and possibly Windows, Macintosh, or any other system Python supports. See "Requirements" below.
Running as a mail-robot means that anyone who knows the right Subject: line email an account on the system where Pagecast is set up, putting the URL's you want to submit in the body of your email. Pagecast will do its magic and then send a reply to you telling you what happened when it is finished. All of Pagecast's features are also availible from the command-line.
For a complete list of features and installation instructions, see the README file.
Pagecast is set of Python scripts. As such, it requires Python 1.5.2 (the current release) or greater. It should work unmodified on any Unix-like system such as Linux or Solaris. Pagecast could be made to work on Windows or Macintosh or any other operating system that Python supports. It might take a little bit of tweaking; users of these systems are invited to send in their experiences. The Pagecast 2.0 final release should include support for at least MS Windows (and Unix, of course) and instructions on how to make it work.
Pagecast requires the Python 1.5.2 threading module. If your Python installation does not have this module, Pagecast will not run. Versions of Python included with Red Hat 5.x and Slackware usually do not have the threading module. The solution is (usually) to recompile Python. For more information, please see the FAQ document in the Pagecast tarball.
Pagecast requires a connection to the Internet, access through port 80 of a firewall, and the ability to send and recieve email (if it is set up as a mail robot.) Having procmail installed is also very helpful in that case.
Shift-click on this link to download the latest stable version of Pagecast. (2.0.0) This is the version for general use.
Shift-click on this link to download the Debian package for the latest beta version of Pagecast 2.0 (2.0 beta 3). (Stable version coming soon.)
Serious users and code hackers will want to use the latest version of Pagecast availible via an anonymous CVS checkout. See the Pagecast CVS page on Sourceforge.net for instructions how to get Pagecast through anonymous CVS (it's not very hard.)
Nightly tarballs of the Pagecast CVS Repository are availible for those who dig such things. (Most people will simply want to do a CVS checkout.)
Consult the included README file for installation and usage instructions. Pagecast is Free Software and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. See the included file COPYING or the GNU website for details. [Pagecast is not an official part of the GNU project but is distributed under the same license.]
Version 2.1 will probably include an automatic server definition update option, and packages for more operating systems.
[1] Which is owned by linkexchange, which is in turn owned by our innovative friends at Microsoft. Let's just hope they don't embrace, extend, and extinguish Pagecast! ;-)
Pagecast now has two mailing lists, one for users and one for developers and power users. We encourage everyone who uses the software more than casually to subscribe. Any kind of discussion related to Pagecast is welcome, and new releases will be announced on the users list first. To subscribe, visit the Pagecast Project Page @ Sourceforge.net and click on the mailing lists link.
Please note that any kind of spamming will not be tolerated. Please don't annoy our list members.
You can contact the author of Pagecast directly at: pbl@pbl.cx
If the program is useful to you, I'd like to hear from you!
Since Pagecast is Free Software, I urge you to contribute to its development. All source code is provided under the GNU General Public License. Please post to the devel mailing list (see above) if you're thinking of contributing.
