Considering to develop my own tools/scripts, any suggestions?

[IMShane]

I'm really not a big fan of SEO tools such as SENuke, uBot or Zennoposter, they are either too expensive or with low success rate or ineffective.

So the basic idea is to use python to simulate all those browser actions (ajax calls or whatever), this would really be a LOT of work to do, anybody working on this as well?

 

[Chris22]

Developing your own tools to achieve what you want is great because you are going to strengthen your programming skills loads, not have to fuck about relying on other tools to do what you need, and at the end of it you may have a pretty good product that you could sell and bank hard from.

On the other hand, don't re-invent the wheel. If a tool does exactly what you need then I'd say it's a waste of time developing your own version.

I develop most of my own tools, but if functionality already exists in another tool that's already out there, I have my code 'hook' in and use those functions as if they were part of my own scripts, instead of doing it entirely by myself from scratch.

 

[grav6]

hi mate, I've been looking at this as well. A few years ago, I wrote some scripts in PHP for article submission and social bookmarking, but maintaining the code became tiresome. I recently purchased AMR, which is OK, but limited to article sites. I've started playing with iMacros (the Firefox plugin) as it seems to be fairly easy to update (just record a new macro).

 

[IMShane]

Developing your own tools to achieve what you want is great because you are going to strengthen your programming skills loads, not have to fuck about relying on other tools to do what you need, and at the end of it you may have a pretty good product that you could sell and bank hard from.

On the other hand, don't re-invent the wheel. If a tool does exactly what you need then I'd say it's a waste of time developing your own version.

I develop most of my own tools, but if functionality already exists in another tool that's already out there, I have my code 'hook' in and use those functions as if they were part of my own scripts, instead of doing it entirely by myself from scratch.

Thanks for your advice!

By the way, what language do you use to create your tools/scripts? It's really frustrating to exactly simulate ajax calls on some sites, and continuously updating my own scripts would cost a lot of time too. I'm trying to figure out an effective way to do all this. It seems everybody's talking about zenno poster right now, although it works in the way of browser automation and is not as fast as I expect, I think I will check it out later.

 

[Chris22]

Thanks for your advice!

By the way, what language do you use to create your tools/scripts? It's really frustrating to exactly simulate ajax calls on some sites, and continuously updating my own scripts would cost a lot of time too. I'm trying to figure out an effective way to do all this. It seems everybody's talking about zenno poster right now, although it works in the way of browser automation and is not as fast as I expect, I think I will check it out later.

I use C# for application logic, and C++/ASM for interop stuff.

 

[ijof9]

I'm walking a development roadline for an alternative to SENuke over here.

What I can tell you is that it matters what you write your code in. The difficulty of the language will dictate how soon you'll lose your nerve and decide not to respond to updates anymore. And another thing that matters is how you approach problems.

For instance if you're scraping a videos search results page with jQuery, you could do

 $('div .video_result').each(function(){...});

But if youtube changes page markup, your code becomes useless, so it's better to get all images smaller than 300x300px, count how many have the same width and height, and consider those to be your thumbnails.

 

[Scritty]

 

[cody41]

"What are you in IM for, to learn new languages, or make money?
Couldn't agree more. I'm a guy who buys most off the shelf programs, but also someone who has dabbled in bot development. I'm more keen now to seeing how others are doing the legwork to program automation and then how I could leverage THAT to make money.

 

[IMShane]

"What are you in IM for, to learn new languages, or make money?"
Good point!

I've tried plenty of IM softwares, and to be honest most of them suck or takes forever to get updates from creators once a site's layout is changed. I'm kinda forced to write my own scripts/tools, and it's more efficient than uBot or Zennoposter, also it doesn't take much more time than recording a uBot/Zennoposter script, and most importantly you get to automate your scripts ultimately whatever the way you want. Well, there's a learning curve of course, but I'm glad where I'm at right now, and will try my best to automate literally everything.

 

[ijof9]

Like I said, if you can afford 4-6 months from now, I'll be releasing my work to the general public.