A Bot Is Born

Did I mention how much I like PEAR? I’m pleased to say that Gary over at Perlworld has offered to help me with the running of BritBlog and with some additional coding. As I mentioned, I’ve got a few exciting ideas that I’d like to implement, but finding the time to actually do the code is not so easy these days.

Anyway, one component that I’ll need is a bot, and the plan behind it is growing. I’m going run bots from several remote locations, using the PEAR XML-RPC interface to enable them to communicate with the main BritBlog server. This may not sound like a great idea, but my web host has complained about the load that BritBlog is causing on the shared host already, so running additional processes on the box is not an option. Just passing a bit of info backwards and forwards though should be OK.

The actual useragent stuff will be done with the HTTP packages. and the HTML parsing will probably use the XML_HTMLSax3 package. This is designed to handle badly coded HTML, so with luck it will be just what the doctor oordered.

Right, I’ve just realised what the time is. It’s too late to cary on planning this stuff - must get my head down!