Website Requests Automation

rubyonrails-talk
1

I had trouble writing the subject, as I am not sure how to describe it concisely!

I run a blog where I post videos. As my routine, everytime I post a new video I post a link back on various other forums which allows this. I would love to automate this by writing some kind of script that access those forums and make the posts.

I also have other websites I would like to automate this for.

Can Ruby on Rails do this?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

2

Xin wrote:

I had trouble writing the subject, as I am not sure how to describe it concisely!

I run a blog where I post videos. As my routine, everytime I post a new video I post a link back on various other forums which allows this. I would love to automate this by writing some kind of script that access those forums and make the posts.

I also have other websites I would like to automate this for.

Can Ruby on Rails do this?

If you already have a blog, and it's not written in RoR, then RoR probably won't help. If your blog itself uses RoR, and if you can upgrade its source, then you can easily add code (if you know how to program Ruby) that adds new features to your process of uploading blog entries.

However, RoR has limitied support to "access those forums". If by access you mean to read their web pages and copy data out, you would need to write lots of extra Ruby code that Rails doesn't make easy.

If you used a test tool like HTTPUnit or Watir, you could access two web pages, read data on one, copy them into another, all just like a user.

I wrote a Watir script once to upload my ZeekLand comic automatically.