mirroring files and data via http

[Matt Nordhoff]

Steve Potter wrote:
> I'm working on a project to create a central administration interface
> for several websites located on different physical servers.
> 
> You can think of the websites as a blog type application. My
> administration application will be used to create new blog posts with
> associated media (images, etc..)
> 
> So I am thinking to setting up a script on each of the sites to "phone
> home" once per day and download any new posts and media files.
> 
> I am thinking of transmitting the post data in an xml format that
> could then be decoded an recorded into the database on the slave
> site.   Are there any easy ways to encode a python dictionary to and
> from xml?
> 
> For the media files I am thinking that the administration interface
> would also provide an xml file with a list of all of the media files
> required along with an http path to retrieve them and a checksum of
> some sort to verify that they were downloaded correctly.
> 
> Basically I am trying to figure out if anything already exists to
> perform some of these functions or if I have to make them from
> scratch.  I know none of it should be too hard, but I hate to re-
> invent the wheel.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Steven Potter

It sounds like JSON would be perfect for this. For working with it in
Python, the simplejson module is popular:

<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson>
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