Post the automation software or techniques you use that save a lot of time.
 

I used to use open source password managers but then realized how easy roboform is. There are a lot of things out there.
Has anyone used uBot and/or ZennoPoster Pro here?

Automation is the key to success now it seems. I'm wondering if anyone here can give some pointers....

Csv importer

Notepad for copy/paste routines. I'm old fashion.

I use bash, perl, awk and sometimes plain old 'sh'.

for f in *.flv
do
... something with "$f" ...
done

A lot of it depends on what you're trying to automate, you could use variations of the above to create thumbnails, do image conversions, produce a list of images that are different sizes, watermarks, etc..

If you can, pick software that has a command line interface (even if it's not the primary interface) because that is the easiest to automate. If it doesn't have a command line interface, sometimes you can build one on top of it.

Once thats done, it becomes a pretty simple matter (especially if the commands are textual) to stack them together into specific tasks. I do this so often I don't even really think of it as "automation". (works best when things are uniform & organized well... "corner cases" are the natural enemy of automation)

Flip side of automation is, sometimes you spend more effort automating something than if you'd done it manually in the first place, it's kind of challenging to decide when to automation will pay off.

If you're stuck on a windows machine, install the cygwin to get access to these kinds of tools, the pathnames are all messed up, it's sluggish & annoying, but cygwin is still a lot better than nothing at all. :)

Magic join links saves me from even having to work.

Interesting, I just wonder how to integrate that or solve that in order to include galleries that are integrated with wordpress. But then I think of it again and it really isn't that hard. I'll definitely check that out. Thanks Mr. Ringo.

Posts like these make starting threads like this worth my while. Thanks unixmaid.

Could you elaborate a little more on this please, seems like you've done good with your blogs from what I've read from you so your opinion has some value.

I used to work with ACDSee daily

batch image resize
bactch file rename
batch image convert and much more

I made a basic Ads | Signups | Revenue spreadsheet

and a Ledger which is great for budgeting weeks or months ahead!



http://freewebs.com/namesort/paysheet.png




http://freewebs.com/namesort/ledger.png

I use spreadsheets too of course, perhaps I should learn some VB and work on some custom excel programming, that may be useful.

For blog networks, definitely http://www.xmarkpro.com/

I wrote a PHP program that chopped the bottom 20 pixels off an image (with the logo)
chopped 5 pixels off the left and right side, and resized back to the original size.

took a few minutes to do 2000 hollywood star photos! They looked better, more zoomed in and loaded quicker!

I automate it all