My VWD Lottery Experience.

by Andy Bailey @ June 4th, 2007. Filed under Blog News

code And here’s me thinking I would be so busy meeting all these companies in such a short amount of time but actually, I seem to be getting periods of 3 or 4 hours where I’m either on my bum traveling or in a place waiting to travel so with my trusty laptop, wifi and a VM image of a webserver - I can code!!

My latest coding ‘time taker-away-er’ is a program that I have wanted to make for a long time, it’s an automatic back office prospect gatherer. All it does is go to my back office, copy the names and email addresses from the page and save them to a .csv and then go to the next page and do it all again and then to the next page and so on until it reaches the last page (759 of them!!)

I could do it manually by copying and pasting but that would take an eternity for over 5000 prospects, I timed it - 2 minutes at least to copy and paste each name and email address from one page (7 Prospects) into a notepad file. I finally got curl working with php and by using a program that displays what headers are being sent to the browser I can copy the cookie information that is sent when I manually log in and click through to the prospects page. Paste that cookie into my script form and off it goes! 5212 prospects gathered in 37 minutes.

yey for me! might be a useful program to offer to experienced vwd’ers. You paid yer munny for them thar 10000 prospects so ee might as well use ‘em!

Oh, I signed up a friend today, I’ve known her for years and she’s known about my elottery for years and after all this time, it was the right time for her to join so I’ll make sure she does well with this and send her a beginners pack with dvd’s, flyers and the new 123-play for free pack.

Welcome in Kersha!

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10 Responses to “There’s even time for some coding! (and signups)”

Ray Jackson Says:
June 6th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Gratz on signing up your old friend Andy, I’m sure you will get here to high places in no time at all…

Like the sound of that codey hehe…
be cheeky and ask what programs you use? so i can try and work it out for me self or is it all just written with your great skill (i bow down to King Geek)

Laters
Raym
Andy Bailey Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
hehe, thanks for your homage RayJ!! I have started using Zend Studio to do my php in now as you can do debug mode and step through the program line by line and see what’s happening to the variables through each loop. sweet!

I’ll see if I can put some instructions up and stick the script on a secret folder and send you the link so you can use it too.

I’ll let you know when it’s done, have to go now, gotta get home and changed and bluff my way through a progress report tonight! :-/
Ray Jackson Says:
June 8th, 2007 at 4:03 am
Thanks for that Andy,

Your the man like i always have said… i’ll keep me eye open then!

well 5am so i guess i best go me bed hehe

Rayj
Andy Bailey Says:
June 9th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
here you go mate, I put up some instructions and the script is ready to use.
be warned though, it may take a long time to process if you have many prospects in your back office!

http://www.theempiregroup.co.uk/parse-prospects.php

This will be the only place linking to it for now as I haven’t added any error checking and I’m not really going to release this as a tool for TEG portal viewers
Ray Jackson Says:
June 9th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Hay Andy,

Thanks man, worked like a charm once i installed FireFox hehe!

got all me contacts a hell of a lot quicker than cut and paste (my keyboard thanks you kind sir)

well here’s to your next ingenues plan hehe

Ray
colin Says:
June 11th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Hello, requested one of your DVDS to look at the e-lottery biz from this website but a week on still no dvd.Was well impressed with the forum you have but to be honest feel very let down that no one has come back to me i even tried joining your forum to ask about the dvd
what is the point in having a website if there is no follow up?
Andy Bailey Says:
June 11th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
if you have sent a request to me Colin, it is very likely that it got canned or lost in the crowd. I had to install some rigorous spam software because i get over 200 emails so sorry about that!
I will search through and find a Colin dvd request and send one out sharpish!
colin Says:
June 12th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Andy many thanks for the reply just to let you know i have signed up to give it a go
Andy Bailey Says:
June 12th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
thanks for joining Colin, I have sent you out a pack of DVD’s for your promotional efforts!
soop Says:
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Hey Andy
Fantastic you excel yet again, 12 months ago i wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about though. (it took 30 mins).
Thank you