How can I make a curl type http request after a node submission?
There's no pre-configured action for making a back-end request like that, so you will need to write some code. It's not going to be terribly hard to accomplish, though. Drupal has a function called drupal_http_request() to hit the external URL. You'll execute that function within a hook_nodeapi() implementation, which runs at various times in the node creation process.

Drupal 6:

&lt;?php
/**
 * Implements hook_nodeapi().
 */
function MODULENAME_nodeapi(&amp;$node, $op) {
  // In D6, this hook is executed at various points in the node creation/render process.
  // We only want to run code during the node's "insert" operation.
  if ($op == 'insert') {
    // Only run for RSS nodes.
    if ($node-&gt;type == 'rss') {
      // Make a back-end HTTP request to an external resource.
      $url = 'http://my-url.com';
      $response = drupal_http_request($url);
    }
  }
}
?&gt;