Automate Your Business

UPDATE : I’ve got my five beta testers, so I’m closing this opportunity for now.

I’m progressing relatively well with the social bookmarking software I’ve written about recently. The only snag is doing the work in the evenings after work and family

I’ve gotten to the point where I can create Gmail accounts on demand. That doesn’t sound like much, but it involves being able to capture the CAPTCHA images, submit them to the third-party service I’m using, receiving their response, handling configuration settings, working with proxies of various types, and creating the front end.

ie, it involved all the hard work.

From now on, it’s more of the same – load webpages, solve captchas, enter data on that webpage, submit the webpage, handle the response.

The only functional things I need to do that I’ve not done already are:

A) monitor RSS feeds and track new posts ready for future promotion.

B) monitor email accounts and respond to accounts verification emails.

C) use bookmarking sites’ APIs where they are available.

All of these I’ve done in other programming languages, so I know I can do them;I just need to translate that work into the language with which I’m writing this application.

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So I’m looking for beta testers.

5 people who are running Windows XP (I’m not – at this point – testing on Vista).

The software is a bit rough round the edges, so the purpose of this testing is simply to throw the software at a few people and see where they break it. Rest assured, it will break, since I’ve not built in a lot of error trapping. So you’re not getting a final draft of the software.

But I also want to be sure that the software – in principle – works on other people’s machines other than mine. Being a developer sometimes means I have software components installed on my machine that other people might not have on theres, and that’s the other key purpose of looking for beta testers at the moment.

There is no cost associated with this, and you’ll get all future versions of the software free – provided you actually help out with the beta testing. If you don’t respond, I’ll cross you off the beta testers list. Tit for tat, that’s the principle here.

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The next stage will be a more formal limited-feature release candidate version – all issues found during beta testing (by me or the beta testers) will be fixed, but only part of the feature set will be available: in this case, just the gmail account creation and a very limited number of social bookmarking sites integrated (ie, one or two).

Anyone interested in this will be able to pay a small one-off fee in compensation for not getting the full set of features, but there will be additional benefits over the longer term, which I’ve got a plan for, but will divulge nearer the time.

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So if you’re interested in being a beta tester, reply below and if you’re amongst the first five, I’ll be in touch.

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