The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
I'd like to provide an easy way to download archived files as torrents. Right now we just put the archived files on an Apache web server where they can be browsed and downloaded via HTTP.
I stumbled upon terasaur but could not find easy information how to actually publish data with it.
Are there best practice guides on how to automatically create torrents and make them available?
Jakob
I don't know about best practice guides (would be nice to see one that's oriented to archives/libraries), but I've had good luck using btmakemetafile which comes with the canonical bittorrent client. It's a command line tool that takes a file or directory as the first argument (the payload of the torrent), and a tracker URL as the second. The key here is the tracker URL, which is used to enable peers to find each other.
A lot of torrent sharing websites essentially act as trackers, in addition to being a catalog of available torrents. You can run your own tracker if you want using bttrack, or you can install a more friendly tracker for managing your collection. Another option is to use an open tracker, or to figure out how to create trackerless torrents (they use a distributed hash table behind the scenes). I'm not sure how to coerece btmakemetafile into making a trackerless torrent though, but I've heard it is possible depending on the version.
I really like the terasaur's idea of a curated collection of torrents for the library/archives community. It would be nice if the process for getting a collection hosted on there was a little bit more transparent, if it enabled a community of curators, not just torrent seeders. A nice side effect of uploading content to Internet Archive and Amazon S3 is that you get a torrent tracker for free. The Internet Archive torrent files can be seen on one of the detail pages.