How To Write Your First Ruby Web Bot In Watir – Scraping Weather.com

Posted in Automation on Apr 4th, 2010 | 27 comments

Time for the fun stuff now. The holy grail for a lot of Internet Marketers is automation. This can be obtained through simple iMacros scripts, some PHP scripts on a server, or with a little tool called Watir using the Ruby programming language. All of these combos have their own inherent advantages and disadvantages, but that’s not something I’m going to go over here. I like to use Watir for a lot of botting needs, so that’s what I’m going to show you how to do today.

Why Ruby? Why Watir?

For anyone who has had the joy of switching to Ruby from other languages, this question should be a no brainer. Ruby is a fun language, it’s clear and concise, reads like English, and has a great collection of plugins (gems) that allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of your apps. Ruby obviously came to fame because of Rails, which is a really nice and powerful framework, but is a whole different beast from web bots. Ruby is a great general purpose language that can be used for a lot of different projects. (more…)