In both my personal and professional life, I keep a local repository of the installers for software I use on multiple systems. People also often ask me to take a look at their computers and clean them up when they get infected or excess crap gets in from those default checked boxes during installations of other software. Keeping those repositories up to date is a bit of a pain and sometimes results in installing an older version of something if I'm in a hurry. Now I've found Ketarin and it's been a big boost in time saving. There's a large database of applications already defined for you to choose from and adding new applications is fairly easy to do. Ketarin is primarily geared to work with FileHippo, including a FileHippo ID field as an alternative to a download URL.
For programs without a FileHippo tracker defined, you can define a variable for the software version by giving it a page to find the current version number (often a program's web site home page) and then highlighting the distinctive text before and after the version number so Ketarin can pick it off the page (and there's a regular expression option for those who grok regular expressions where the captured group of the matching text is assigned as the value of the variable). If the version is part of the installer's file name then the download URL is given as something like http://website.tld/files/SuperDuperInstaller{version}.exe and Ketarin replaces {version} with the parsed out version variable you taught it to find earlier.
It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I've already run across a preset that caused crashes until I edited the SQLite database with an external editor. It doesn't work will with SourceForge hosted programs yet, but it can let you know if there's an updated version available.
Ketarin has already saved me a day of work updating the repository with the newest versions of software like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Inkscape, Paint.Net, 7-Zip, FileZilla, CCleaner, Foxit Reader, and so many more.
