I've read some posts about a new script that spiders other sites, I've ran several news realted sites, and there are several variations of it out there.

I think I have a plan for a pretty cool news script. Anyone good enough at perl done anything close or working on it, let me know. I've bought some perl books and I hope to do it as soon as I learn enough!

First of, It bascially has 2 scripts. One for web masters who host a "News Hub" and one for web masters who produce news.

The news hub script would be run daily ( either by cron job or by the web master ) and it would build pages much like links does, allowing active validation by the webmaster. There would be a "newssites.dat" file that would have all the url's to the news.dat files of those sites. The news.dat would be formatted in a flat db. ( more on that in a min). The admin could go in and process new news and create pages. The format would be consistant on all sites, so you could have local templates or config files for how the output would look.

On the remote sites ( where the news is generated ) the web master has a similar utility to display his own news, as well as a n admin utiltiy to write the news into the news.dat file.

The admin sites could be done well enought to allow web based admin of color's and layout.

It would work like a news affiliate type thing.

I'd love to see this

------------------
The Crowe crowe@darkspiral.com
http://www.darkspiral.com