Recently I've really developed a certain affinity with imacros when doing webautomation. I've been a hack for over a decade and have written in a few langauages. In my never-to-be-humble opinion, nothing comes close for ease of use and reliable web automation than iMacros (FREE) & PHP/mysql (FREE) with a little winautomation ($285).
Sure, you can get away with using a cUrl and some other libraries to scrape and post your way through a lot of CMS's, but eventually you'll want to engineer some automation on one of the big boys (google, youtube, facebook, linked in, ....) and there will be some quirky issue that prevents completion. In most cases, iMacros is simply the right tool for the job.
This blog will likely be quite a bit of me talking to myself since not many people automate this way. That matters not to me since it's fun and might help someone, somewhere, sometime ...
My tutorial will likely be welcomed by the less programming savvy members because it allows you to shift focus away from your weakness (server side languages) and put you in an environment where most of the important stuff is very visual. I'll also try to include useful php code so that it's easy to test this stuff out yourself.
Here's the typical workflow for a project
1. create web UI (for me, php/mysql) for inserting "data" - This could be anything from proxy information, spam information (links, keywords), user data (login information), or any other kind of information that you need to be pulled for automated processes. It's very cheap to outsource this work if you want to kick it in the ass ... like a simple form submission to mysql, $50 or so
2. create iMacro scripts that "calls home" to grab data and then "does stuff" on the web. Yes, I'm very well aware that you can use a csv to feed information to iMacros. I don't like that option, it's lazy and doesn't fit into the bigger picture of "calling home".
3. use a simple javascript as a hook to run my scripted imacro and the closing of the browser. I'm not a huge fan of this but in the long run, a little js knowledge can get you out of a few automation jams.
4. winautomation is the duct tape that binds the entire process together. I use it to call home to see if there's work to do, if so, drop a command line that fires the above javascript that makes the magic happen. Winautomation's best feature IMO is that you can create an executable script ... this is HUGE when you consider that because of this, scaling is a very minor issue with $35 windows VPSs on the market.
To get you warmed up, here's a video of Michael Schrenk @ DEFCON17 I ran across not long ago talking about a similar system. His idea of installing WAMP and using php locally is definitely a viable option ... I don't personally use it because it makes scaling a bit harder (more to setup).
Sure, you can get away with using a cUrl and some other libraries to scrape and post your way through a lot of CMS's, but eventually you'll want to engineer some automation on one of the big boys (google, youtube, facebook, linked in, ....) and there will be some quirky issue that prevents completion. In most cases, iMacros is simply the right tool for the job.
This blog will likely be quite a bit of me talking to myself since not many people automate this way. That matters not to me since it's fun and might help someone, somewhere, sometime ...
My tutorial will likely be welcomed by the less programming savvy members because it allows you to shift focus away from your weakness (server side languages) and put you in an environment where most of the important stuff is very visual. I'll also try to include useful php code so that it's easy to test this stuff out yourself.
Here's the typical workflow for a project
1. create web UI (for me, php/mysql) for inserting "data" - This could be anything from proxy information, spam information (links, keywords), user data (login information), or any other kind of information that you need to be pulled for automated processes. It's very cheap to outsource this work if you want to kick it in the ass ... like a simple form submission to mysql, $50 or so
2. create iMacro scripts that "calls home" to grab data and then "does stuff" on the web. Yes, I'm very well aware that you can use a csv to feed information to iMacros. I don't like that option, it's lazy and doesn't fit into the bigger picture of "calling home".
3. use a simple javascript as a hook to run my scripted imacro and the closing of the browser. I'm not a huge fan of this but in the long run, a little js knowledge can get you out of a few automation jams.
4. winautomation is the duct tape that binds the entire process together. I use it to call home to see if there's work to do, if so, drop a command line that fires the above javascript that makes the magic happen. Winautomation's best feature IMO is that you can create an executable script ... this is HUGE when you consider that because of this, scaling is a very minor issue with $35 windows VPSs on the market.
To get you warmed up, here's a video of Michael Schrenk @ DEFCON17 I ran across not long ago talking about a similar system. His idea of installing WAMP and using php locally is definitely a viable option ... I don't personally use it because it makes scaling a bit harder (more to setup).
I'll be using this blog to share some code that does some useful stuff from time to time. Feel free to get involved in the conversation.