Create PAD files with PAD Manager and PADGen
PAD means Portable Application Description, and it’s a standard helping software authors to distribute product descriptions and specifications to online sources in a format that will allow webmasters and program librarians to automate program listings. PAD uses established web technology, XML. With XML, data can be easily extracted and parsed by any XML toolkit.
The PAD file should go in two places. The first is inside your downloadable file so that anyone distributing your software can quickly extract the file and retrieve any information that they need. Inside that file, include the PAD file as PAD_FILE.XML. The second location for the PAD file is on your website. Many download sites ask for only the URL to your PAD file, and they do the rest, importing all your file descriptions, sizes, and product information directly from your web site. It is important that you use an address on your site that won’t change, so don’t use a version number in the link. That’s because some sites are automatically checking your PAD files for changes on a regular schedule, and when they find a new version of the PAD file, they update their lists immediately.
PAD Manager features: Built-in PAD validator and optimizer that helps you to maximize the results from your promotion campaign * Visual management of company and product profiles * Allows co-workers to share the same profile database over the network * Installs by default and automatically updates some useful PAD extensions (RSS Feed Aggregators, Site Directories, Affiliate Sites and others) * Built-in FTP Uploader * Compatible on the data level with popular submission applications and services
PADGen creates Portable Application Descriptions (PAD) files for all applications. With this information long detailed submission forms may soon be a thing of the past! Submitting the PAD file will easily allow webmasters access to all your information.
