The other day I looked into perhaps distributing some stuff with BitTorrent. And I was left with an impression that the process publishing files over BitTorrent is a bit clumsy. Anyone can easily download torrents - and quite a bit of folks do, actually. But, if you wanted to distribute your own stuff with BitTorrent you have a small litany, of sorts, to execute. It's not really too bad, but I found the whole process awkward. I suspect that less-technical folks can easily get confused and it might be a bit too much for them.
Well, today I'm announcing the release of EZtorrent, @ http://eztorrent.courier-mta.com. This small tool combines the entire procedure into a simple, one or two step process. “ezt create” creates a directory, then you plonk some files there, then “ezt start” takes care of everything else: creating .torrents, then starting a tracker, and the seeders. To publish more files with BitTorrent, add some files to the directory, then run “ezt restart”. That's it. I don't recall ever getting any complaints about problems downloading Courier tarballs from Sourceforge. They seem to have sufficient bandwidth and infrastructure available. But, if their download servers ever become too cranky, I can now cut over to BitTorrent at a moment's notice. And that's the whole point. I believe that BitTorrent is quite an amazing bit of code. I'm all in favor in promoting and advancing its popularity, and I'd like to encourage more folks to begin using it to distribute all sorts of free content. I hope that eztorrent brings down the learning curve, and enables more people get involved with BitTorrent.
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