This was going to be a tutorial on getting these two things running to achieve everything I want, sadly I can’t work out how to get the last step working, which is to navigate the returned Ajax page to allow me to extract different information. As such this is more a guide on getting the two things installed and working – if you have any more luck than I do on getting navigating Ajax working then let me know!! XULRunner First things first, I downloaded the Windows version of XULRunner from (look in the runtimes directory!): http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/ (Unpacking takes a while the 8.23MB download contained 302 items totalling 18.8MB!) Crowbar Not such a simple download for the uninitiated. It’s not… Continue reading »

This post is just a reference point for another post, a Subversion client is needed for downloading Crowbar, so I downloaded TortoiseSVN available here. A quick install with the default options and I was away. I created a new folder on my desktop called Crowbar, went into it and did a right click (TortoiseSVN is an explorer extension so there’s no program to run directly!). Alpha Dog release TortoiseSVN -> Export Then pasted in the trunk from the Crowbar instructions page.

I apologise now if I put off some of the more general readers with this post, but I’ve struck upon a bit a problem! I have some automated code that I wrote using PHP and Curl, that retrieves a mountain of information from a website, does some statistical analysis on it and then presents me with a nice little report (having inserted the data into a MySQL database). It’s wonderful – to do the process manually would take maybe 2-3 hours every day, as it is I wake up to a nice report sat in my inbox everyday with all the information in it. Now I have a problem, the website that I crawl to get this information is converting… Continue reading »