Thank you Andreaz and jdarling for your answers.

I think esp. the link to that Indy project may help me to better understand the theory and application of network programming. Also thanks for the the torrent hint.

Now for the questions:

1. I have some webspace with PHP and MySQL, but while I use PHP very regularly and have some experience with it, I never touched MySQL so far. The weblog software I use on the website of my game is written by me, but uses plain text files for storing articles, comments and other data.

2. Usually, I store my program archives on Google Code, because some of them are rather big (about 100 MB or more). I get direct download links for the archives, so I could put these into the XML file suggested by Andreaz.


Overall, I'm interested in both ways. If you, jdarling, have a working solution, I would appreciate to get it explained. I will, however, check out the Indy thing, to get a better understanding of networking stuff.