Automate Your Business

Archive for December, 2009

A customer emailed me recently to say that someone (he says his host, but admits it might have been him, by accident) had deleted the backups from his server in order to save space. Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with his site(s), just that he was left with no backup to restore in case of future problems.

Realising that it’s a bit of a risk having no backups, he wisely went on to purchase the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script that I sell. Which means that not only will he have backups made overnight, but he’ll have them both within Cpanel and also FTPed to another location. Ideally this will be a different physical location, so if his host server farm goes up in flames, his backups are safe somewhere else. Don’t laugh – similar things have happened to me.

Are you exposed to a similar risk? If so, take a moment to review the backup software.

I love iMacros! It’s one of the best web macro recorders around.

I hate iMacros! The only way to make them into a standalone executable is to use iOpus’ own iMacros player, which has a license fee attached – even though I’ve already paid quite a bit for the full iMacro recorder (before iMacro for Firefox came out).

OK, so iMacro for firefox is a great tool, but what if I want to share the macro, as a paid product? Well, I’d have to record in Firefox, and then pay the license fees for iMacros player.

So I’ve decided to write myself a converter, to turn the macro into a self-contained executable, which can be run via a double-click on a desktop icon. (Actually, from a technical point of view, the converter turns it into another language, which I then manually turn into a self-contained executable via another tool).

I’ll be using my converter to help write PromotionBot – I can record the macros in the free iMacros for Firefox, or in my purchased iMacros for IE, to make the recording of the macros really very quick and accurate. Then I can convert them into the same programming language which I’m using to write PromotionBot, and that’s the bulk of the work done for that particular macro. At that point I simply need to edit the code a bit to integrate into my main PromotionBot code, and I’m done.

So, a question for you: If I were to offer this as a service (take an iMacro script, and turn it into a self-contained executable), would you be interested in using the service? (It’ll be a one-off fee per script).

Let me know your thoughts…

Disaster! My main evernote 2.2 database won’t open in the 2.2 – I get an “invalid file size” error!

Aaaargh..

Edit: Got there in the end. My rigour with backups resulted in a version of the file which opened OK. Phew.

I’ve been searching for an Evernote 2.2 installer for a while now, as version 3

A) Has less features

B) Lost some of my data when I imported

C) And is generally crap (although still amongst the best note-taking app that I’ve tried).

Fortunately, I found a new source of the Evernote 2.2 installer.

Just thought I’d share it in case anyone else is looking for the same.

The offer mentioned yesterday is over now. Many thanks to those who took advantage of it – I trust that you find your purchases useful and worthwhile. As always, if you need support, I’ve got some FAQ-type of information online, but the ticket helpdesk is also available for other requests.