All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

iMacros: Automation for Firefox

Mark Leighton Fisher on 2009-07-17T17:16:19

iMacros for Firefox is the Web automation solution I have been looking for. Why iMacros? Because:

  1. You record what you actually do, rather than trying to reconstruct what you did from memory;
  2. The end product is a vanilla ASCII macro language editable by vi (or the editor of your choice);
  3. The macro language works at a high level -- for example, HTML element absolute and relative positioning are among the macro language features included;
  4. You can extract data from a page as text or HTML;
  5. An iMacro can be used as a Firefox bookmark; and
  6. The Firefox add-on version is freeware.

To give an idea of how exciting I found iMacros for Firefox, I immediately wrote 2 iMacros after installing iMacros that I have been wanting to write forever (a downloader for the titles of my blog posts and a front end to our local real estate browser to jump right to the properties in our county).

I have only scratched the surface of what can be done with the freeware version of iMacros -- if you need web automation, iMacros is worth a look.

[Flash and Java can be supported through the DirectScreen command (as yet untested by me, as DirectScreen is only avaiable in the paid editions).]

[Ob.Perl: Once designed, something like iMacros would be relatively easy to write in a Firefox-embedded Perl.]