Some dink wants to be able to manage his google adwords off the command line. So I'm writing perl scripts that connect, log in, go to the appropriate page, download the content, write it to a file, and then a second script that takes the file and uploads it.
It's gonna be a pain in the _ass_. It's sniggery, not difficult. There's this really useful perl module- Mechanize. It's essentially all the power of a web-browser. It's a kinda interesting project.
[edit: Awww sexy. Got it logging in, downloading the appropriate page for the keywords, and pulling the keywords out of it. Very nice. And that same code can be recycled for the update. So now it's just a matter of putting together the file that he wants stored, and parsing the file that contains the list of campaigns and ads.]
[edit again: Testing software is always a pain in the ass. It goes with the territory. Testing however becomes more of a pain in the ass when the server you're trying to connect to (adwords.google.com in this case) decides that it's going to not return full responses, and even when it does, it takes a fucking long time to get a response. Figure it takes about 30sec per page. It has to cycle through about 10 pages total, and most of those pages it doesn't even need- they're just part of the path. So sure, that's only 300 seconds, or about 5 minutes. But it's a simple command line app and it's just... annoying. Mind you, it's not a big deal for a _real_ application. However for a $25 contract that I took just so I could have a contract and boost my ratings.... *snark*]
