Today I created my first torrent. Last year, the 10th of August, I recorded a small movie of my pet scorpion (male Centruroides flavopictus) catching a cricket. Last Saturday I used a webcam to record another male scorpion under UV light. Since I wanted to distribute both movies using a torrent, I had been looking around for a few days for an easy solution.
I decided to use Prodigem Hosting services for hosting and seeding the torrent. Other options I considered: OpenTracker, and ByteMonsoon. Both are written in PHP and require MySQL support. The latter sounded to complicated for my simple needs and the former, although lightweighted, requires magic_quotes_gpc to be set to "off". So I emailed Prodigem for more information and got an invite to create an account.
Note: Prodigem has become MoveDigital.
A Wiki entry described how to upload the files to Prodigem and how to create the torrent, which was quite easy. In the next step I had to select a license. I decided to use the Creative Commons version 2 license with the options: Attribution, NonCommercial, and No Derivative Works.
Of course I run now and then BitTorrent to assist in the seeding, and if you download the torrent, please let it run for some extra time too.