Thursday, May 16, 2013

Extending scripts functionality to Ajax

These days, I get to see a lot of websites reshaping – transforming from simple HTML to Web 2.0/3.0, utilizing advanced technologies majorly including Ajax and jQuery. This decreases bounce rate by increasing use visiting time as websites are becoming more user friendly and attractive.

Enhancing GUI produces favorable results for website owners, however at the same time; they make it difficult for people like me who are trying to make their work easy using different software, plug-ins or tricky approaches. This article is about how to fool websites and automate most of the tasks that otherwise acquire huge efforts – for now, let’s target one the biggest B2B websites of all ‘Alibaba.com’. I have been utilizing this portal from a very long time and undoubtedly they are the pioneers and result generating platform – none other comes even closer to them.

Anyhow, while working at a website I had to acquire products category list along with sub-categories so I rushed to Alibaba without wasting any time; they offer enhanced category selection option while you post products and it’s complete ajax-ed things. Firstly, I found it bit difficult in acquiring lists as it’s little tricky – you have to click individual categories to drill-down deeper and they are four leaf-level categories present. View the image below, see what I meant:

iMacro scripts

iMacro scripts

At the end, I was able to acquire complete list using java-script based iMacro bots. These bots come handy in conditions like this, as the list contained around 4.8k categories in total and it could have taken around 2 to 3 days for a human being to copy-paste all of them manually – saved me a lot of time and effort, script itself took around half an hour and scrapping took only 25 minutes. Impressive, isn’t it. Here is how the final sheet looks like:

iMacro script results

This is just an example of where you can actually deploy iMacro scripts, there could be thousands of places where you could save days efforts and increase your staff’s performance and time. If you are having trouble performing manual tasks, I am the here for you – share me your problems, suggest me tricky websites and solution and if I like your suggestions, I will share these iMacro scripts for free to you.

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