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Automating Menial Tasks with Imacros

14. Jun 2007 | 10 Comments

The menial tasks are often the ones that take up the most time in our busy days, I guess that’s why they’re called menial.They could be any of the following:

  1. Checking Affiliate Stats
  2. Adjusting Bids in Adwords Campaigns
  3. Moderating Posts on your Forum
  4. Accepting orders from your Ecommerce Website
  5. Downloading log files once a month from your server
  6. Leaving eBay Feedback for all users

There are plenty of ways that you can automate your day to make things tick along much smoother & leave you with more time to spend on the stuff that matters.

But the main problem is that most of us don’t either have the coding knowledge to write a custom script to do this for us or have the contacts with coders to have them do it for us.

That’s where Imacros comes in.

Imacros

A macro in computer science is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure.

With this plugin, any task that you can do within the Firefox interface you can have Imacros record it & automate it for you. This includes:

  1. Filling forms & passwords
  2. Web Automation
  3. Automating Downloads
  4. Information Scraping into .csv files

For example when I want to check affiliate stats I have a macro that will go in, open all the websites up in seperate tabs on the exact page with the stats.

You could even take this further & use the extraction tool to take the data from your affiliate stats & save it in .csv format.

For some example on how to automate with Imacros here’s some tutorials:

  1. Browser Automation Tutorial
  2. Form Filling Tutorial
  3. Image Recognition Tutorial
  4. Web Scripting Tutorial

Another good application for doing this is AutoHotKey which will also help you automate almost anything, except this time you trigger it via your keyboard.

I’m also keen to hear what practial uses any of you guys have implemented with either of these plugins.

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10 Comments on "Automating Menial Tasks with Imacros"

shaun 14. Jun 2007, 3:43 pm

Hello! Excellent review for Imacros I use a program similar to that at work but I can’t remeber what it’s called. I noticed you stopped by my site through my recent readers on Mybloglog and I just wanted to thank you for stopping by and I hope you had found my site useful enough to subscribed to my feed: http://www.shaunlow.com, I have subscribed to yours as well :) See you around.

Homeless 14. Jun 2007, 5:31 pm

Excellent review
Instead AutoHotKey, I use Keyboard Maniac
http://www.keyboardmaniac.com/

Not free but much better for me :)

markus941 15. Jun 2007, 5:43 am

I got iMacros a while ago and was pretty excited but in reality I haven’t been able to think of anything that I can automate too easily where the initial time it takes to create the macros make is really worth it.

Checking the affiliate stats all at once is a pretty good application though.

Peter 16. Jun 2007, 5:09 am

autohotkey is awesome. It helped me achieve some amazing things I wouldn’t have achieved on my own ;)

Andre 20. Jun 2007, 7:06 am

Here is what I use iMacros for:

- Automate _all_ my logins. Imacros works as good as Roboform but is free! And it can take you to the *right* page directly after the login. This is great and saves my plenty of typing and clicking for many logins

- Login to Google Adwords/AdSense/Analytics and automatically open the pages and reports that I need to check daily.

- Check my ranking in Google (I created a Javascript inside iMacros for this task)

- Whenever I need to delete or change a lot of things at once (Spam, user posts, Flickr pictures,…) I create a small macro for it and start it with the LOOP button.

- Automatically backup my PHPBB forums, just like it is described at http://forum.iopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=22

- Place test orders in my online store

- Automated some standard searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Cheers
Andre

TrueAutomation 21. Apr 2008, 1:38 am

We have an AutoHotkey script that is always running with more than a hundred hotkeys linked to often-used tasks. We use this script to open files/folders/websites, start programs/emails, enter accounts, change fonts, select default printer, track shipping and so on. We use an Enterpad keyboard to start each macro so we don’t have to remember any hotkeys. Everything works great! Our script file size ranges from 25 to 30K and I use it with XP and Vista.

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