[Journal] I have no idea where this is gonna end

[Light Concept]

Hello again,


Since my intro yesterday, I wandered around the forums, and since I was already familiarized with pinterest I though it would be a nice path to follow.

I plan to (try to) use pinterest to make money with amazon (like many others before me, I know). Seems a nice project to start off.

But, I'll do this my own way:

This is a journal about making money and my own version of the pinterest bot, which I named cork bot Maybe I need to rethink the name. Suggestions?

I already started coding it. At the moment, it can:

• login;
• invite someone (providing his email of course);
• create simple boards, need to implement category selection and the ability to add other users to the board;
• follow and unfollow users.

Some time ago, I worked on a scraper for the images of the boards. Will extend that to scrape users and pins too and add it to the bot.

Also:

I'm building some support to mailinator. Gonna use that for now to try to collect invites for pinterest and create twitter accounts so that I then can create pinterest accounts. Maybe later, I can add support for hotmail and gmail through pop connections. Is there another email provider worth looking into?

At this point, I can gather all emails from the mailinator inbox. I only need a piece of code to parse those emails and collect the invites from pinterest and the twitter accounts activation links.

And to finish:

I can't post directly affiliate links from amazon, they will end up being changed. So, I already coded a small server which allows me to pin a link and then activate the redirect so that the users end up at amazon and not the original page I pinned. That original page is only meant to be pinned and simply displays the affiliate link and an image of the item. All this is made automatically based on the asin of the item.

I guess for not this is all.

 

[Lalalaenhund]

Well, at least you got a nice thread name . Good luck.

 

[Light Concept]

Yeah, just had a creativity juice

 

[Light Concept]

After hitting my head on the wall a couple of times, I managed to build the twitter account creator and a scraper for pinterest's invitation links from mailinator inboxes.

Tomorow, I will improve the twitter account creator with a random name generator, random password generator and random mailinator generator so that the accounts creation is almost automatic, except for the captcha, for now at least.

Will then add a feature to activate the newly created twitter accounts and depending on the mood, I will look into the pinterest account creator.

Gonna get some sleep now. It's 4am here

 

[Light Concept]

I usually end up doing not what I intended to do initially but what I'm in the mood to Life's good!

So, I spend a couple of hours doing a scraper for pinterest. At this point, the app can scrape any page (i guess) based on urls, to get info about the pins (url, title, description, image, pinboard, pinner, etc...). I scrape all the pins, not just the 50 of the first page. I limited this though. The app will not get more than 20 pages of pins if those are available (like on the front page). Still, this will get a huge number of pins ==> 20*50 = 1000...

This is taking a nice shape.

 

[Light Concept]

Ended up waiting all afternoon trying to find a way to speed up the scraper. Got nowhere. Will research more later.

Also added 2 news features: A simples text spinner and a random name generator.

 

[Light Concept]

Hey,

you're new here too?

 

[Light Concept]

First, I started to put this thing together. Instead of all this being a couple of functions it's now a rudimentary system with multiple functions working together.

Also, I can now pin stuff!

I have no idea what I'll implement next but I'm thinking in building the minimum features so that I can start using it to make some acounts on pinterest to push traffic to amazon.

We'll see...

 

[Light Concept]

Development as been slow.

I ended up giving finishing touches to some functions who needed it.

I now have the invite creation on auto-pilot:
=> give a pinterest account
=> generate invites from said account
=> collect invites from inbox

I also can create twitter accounts by now, only needing to insert the captcha. I also collect the activation from the inbox.

Time to make pinterest accounts and coding like a mad man!

 

[Light Concept]

By now, I have a server in production state.

It's ready to redirect to amazon.

I will start pinning books, so I scraped some book links separated by category.

 

[Light Concept]

I would like to add that I'm accepting suggestions, ideas and complete techniques and strategies into this thing.

I'm not planning into selling this but to keep it for personal use only. For those with strong contributions, I might share what I make with them.

 

[Light Concept]

Implementes some more useful little functions, like searching and bulk-following popular users. But more importantly, now I can populate boards based on keywords. Now, my accounts don't look like ghost towns.

 

[Light Concept]

Populating boards based on keywords is nice! But, the problem is, you end up repinning identical pics. So my next is just that, I'm implementing a simple filter which will allow me to check if I'm repinning an image I already pinned.

 

[M1ndfluX]

Im not in the pinterest game so i cant help you with that kind of advice unfortunally.
But i see that you are dedicated so thats at least the half of our game...

Good luck bro!

 

[Light Concept]

Thanks!

Well, I guess the best move you can make is to start doing things and experimenting.

For example, I started using mailinator but the system seems to have changed meanwhile and I can't create invites with it.

After implementing a new email provider, I learned that I could send one invite but if I used the same email 2 times, one after the other, I couldn't get the second invite out. I have no idea if this is just for me or they are changing the way the invites work.

Anyway, I'm learning more new stuff to help me go further.

Maybe the next step should be to find some one t sell me email accounts or JV with me, as long as he can provide emails but even then, I will have to add pop3 support which shouldnt be hard. Still, this is not important right now. I already have a couple of accounts to test and continue developing this.

Im not in the pinterest game so i cant help you with that kind of advice unfortunally.
But i see that you are dedicated so thats at least the half of our game...

Good luck bro!

 

[Light Concept]

Populating boards based on keywords is nice! But, the problem is, you end up repinning identical pics. So my next is just that, I'm implementing a simple filter which will allow me to check if I'm repinning an image I already pinned.

This is done. Now my boards look cleaner and don't have duplicates in them.

I ended up using a simple algorithm to compare images but it's good enough for this. It was a bit heavy on the computer side, but then again, instead of comparing the full pictures, I now only need to make a comparison between 2 parts from the same area of both pics.

Regarding my strategy, I'm thinking into building niche themes. For example, for one account it would be

 

[gRaViJa]

looks like you're doing well my Pinterest adventure didn't go very well, i'll keep it at Clickbank and Twitter. Anyway, your project looks promising. Good luck.

 

[Light Concept]

looks like you're doing well my Pinterest adventure didn't go very well, i'll keep it at Clickbank and Twitter. Anyway, your project looks promising. Good luck.

Thanks. This is shapping up well. My main library of code has almost 700 lines of code and I believe the final number will be much higher since there are quite a lot of functions and logic still missing.

What happened to your pinterest adventure?

 

[Light Concept]

Funny thing this morning.

Since I started building this, although this might be considered a bot, my idea was never to do heavy spamming. I all-in for quality not quantity. So instead, this was simply meant for an easier account creation and building to provide me with nice looking account at the click of a button.

None the less, it's still a bot and as such I took measures to disguise it and look more human so that the accounts look real => reason for coding an algorithm to compare 2 images (see, above).

Now, this morning I thought it would be a good idea to add support for some url shortner. Yeah, seemed a good idea so I went straight to it and built an account creator for bitly, a way to login and shorten my links with the created account. Simple right? It was.

But then I remember to go to pinterest and see if a posted short url would remain short or they would "un-shorten" it to display the long and original link. I found this:



Damn!

Possible solutions:
- Use other link shortners and hope this doesn't happen again.
- Build a simple, personal url shortner and host it online.

I like the second idea more. If for some reason, something goes wrong, I can always re-host it. Same thing for my amazon server.

 

[Light Concept]

Took some days off. My computer was running very slow so I used those days to format my mac and build a proper and clean dev machine.

It's time to get back on track. Gong to code the repin function next.