Spinneret

Record and automate anything on the web

3 followers

Record and automate anything on the web

3 followers

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Automation tools

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Cloud Computing Platforms

Spinneret makes it super easy to record web workflows or "tracks," then re-run them locally or in the cloud. - Programmatically do stuff on the web (click buttons, fill out forms, extract text from pages) with dynamic inputs via your track's API endpoint.

Launch tags:Productivity•Developer Tools

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Modash Influencer Search

Super interesting project. What do you think for you, would be the most interesting way people could use this?

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6yr ago

@avery_schrader I think there is a lot of use-cases when we want to automate a web flow or process no? Especially when you need to have access to external sets of data without being connected.

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

Hi @avery_schrader, thanks for asking! There are a bunch of use cases, three ones I think are particularly interesting are: 1. Bot Services - Spinneret lets you build an API on top of other websites without having to code, so you can easily spin up some pretty funky bots to automate repetitive web tasks with dynamic inputs Some fun bot ideas I had off the top of my head: - DMV Appointment scheduler -> automatically fills out appointment booking on DMV website based off your schedule. Checks every X minutes for new availability. - Resume Blast Bot - Fill in your resume/LinkedIn once, Spinneret simultaneously fills it out on 100 company sites you are interested in applying to. Excited to see what else the maker community comes up with! 2. Advanced Web Scraping - a lot of useful data is behind site login, pagination, button clicks and form fills. Especially for sites that are server side rendered, and API reversing isn't trivial. You can use spinneret to quickly spin up web scraping tracks (right click to extract & label text!), and get structured data from web pages at scale. This can be used for e-commerce price comparisons, growth hacking, sales insights. 3. QA Testing - spinneret could be used as a no-code alternative to automated UI testing software like selenium or puppeteer. Create regression tests for your website just by recording tracks in the browser. I include this one last because I think it would need a couple more features (assertions, editing tracks) before being a truly robust QA solution, but interesting nonetheless!

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6yr ago

@avery_schrader @zachary_denham OMG someone finally read my mind!! Ive been begging for someone to come out with exactly this! Having profound hearing loss all my life, communication is a completely different survival skill than what it might mean for regular hearing people. For example. an I-phone for me, or a smart phone is a durable medical device - my heаring aids stream via bluetooth and are ios/andriod compatible. I was also recently implanted with a cochlear implant that is also iOs/andriod compatible. So yes I even went under the knife to get an iOs/android compatible latest and greatest technology in medicine so far... For me getting a new iphone every year is not exciting, it doesn;t appeal to me that I have to not only condigure all the devices, accessories microphones and lovely gadgets to the latest generation, but I am also constantly at risk with skipping an iOS system upgrade or if I dont keep up with the constant debiliting fear of something going wrong during an update, or a device phasing out without any forewarning causing me to sit in all day troubleshooting things, I never knew could shot and cause trouble beyond belief. Also don't forget everything needs to be documented, and try to keep up with it all technology moves fast, imagine what it does to me... Im still syncing my last iOS update to my 22 electrodes implanted in my head....for example I would absolutely love it if my phone rang directly to my MacBook when I am near it, once I answer a call it must go through a series of steps depending on what "TTY" option I use depending if I am answering my phone, speaking handsfree using my HAs or doing a conference call and which prompts the captioner immediately or uses AI closed captioning. Theres so many ways I could go with this, my ideas are endless. Except they aren't ideas, i need this.... my bionic ears Beyond grief, if this is loosing it at any minute. Every single behavior

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6yr ago

@zachary_denham I have to try this out someday, i have a very specific sequence that I have sorta wrote on paper, but I need someone to help me build it as a workflow. Is this self explanatory or does it require more trainijng?

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6yr ago

Modash Influencer Search

@phb For sure, I like poking at the makers inner thought process though, sometimes that's even more interesting than the tool itself. Also, I'm not all that clever, so having a couple use cases helps spur my imagine.

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

Hello! Stoked to be launching this project on PH!! Some details on spinneret: - It works by recording & saving DOM events as you interact with web pages in the browser - Each track has an API endpoint you can invoke to re-run the track programmatically - Tracks spin up a headless browser and recreate events with dynamic inputs This is the first version of the app and is pretty simplistic, future releases will include: - Automatic IP proxying - AI-powered site-change resistance - CSV Upload inputs to create a track - Chrome extension?

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6yr ago

Lyne

@zachary_denham would it work behind a login such as LinkedIn Sales Nav?

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

@hans_dekker The goal is to support all websites, and simulate realistic human behavior on the web, so the algorithm to locate the right page elements and perform actions on them is always under improvement. I haven't tried running any tracks behind LinkedIn login, and I know they put quite a bit of effort into bot prevention. That being said, its definitely worth a shot!

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6yr ago

Lyne

@zachary_denham thanks! Final question: what about scraping sites such as Clutch? In order to get the right URL of companies I have to click the button linked as clutch.co?redirect_xyz and then copy the actual company url from my Chrome bar. Would that work? If so, I'm signing up for life ;)

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6yr ago

@zachary_denham @hans_dekker also interested in behing login

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

@hans_dekker this feature is not currently implemented, but is an easy add! If I’m understanding correctly, you are looking for an output of the site URL after performing some click actions, correct?

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6yr ago

MealsAI

Is there any API documentation btw? I created a track to save a Spotify track to a playlist - but I don’t see how to run it from the API

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

@alex_pareto1 excellent question! There is no API documentation currently, but if you navigate in the spinneret browser to: tracks > run in cloud > snippets tab You can copy a code snippet with an example network request to the spinneret API in your language of choice (node, go & python are supported out of the box) and invoke the track programmatically. Also, don't forget to label your inputs if your track has text inputs, then you can post dynamic input in the request body!

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6yr ago

?makers can you use this to upload a csv file to a form? and can this software be installed on your own infrastructure?

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

@gabi_udrescu the software is not self hosted, but you can easily make calls to the spinneret API from your own back end / infrastructure. It does not support CSV out of the box, the recommended way to invoke tracks from a CSV would be to write a little script that loops through the rows of the CSV, then makes a call to the spinneret api with the csv column values as inputs!

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6yr ago

Hi @zachary_denham, very interesting! I love tools like this. Always on the lookout for better/easier/faster ways to automate and extract the web. I took it for a spin and had an easy time extracting individual elements, but I couldn't figure out how to extract all entries in an ordered list or rows in a table, for example, without clicking on every instance of every element on the page. - Is this possible? If so, what am I missing? If not, then I'd offer the feedback that being able to pattern match to extract multiple unique instances of something after defining the output once: e.g. let's say I want to extract everything that matches {li.result span.name} from this list: https://imgur.com/odUo9tc, I only have to define this pattern once. - Also, I tried but couldn't find any documentation, are there docs I could reference?

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

@krollja Hey Jonathan! Extracting list data is in the pipeline, but not currently implemented, also working on getting documentation up. In the mean time, if you go to the "snippets" tab you can copy the request you need to make in whatever language

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6yr ago

@krollja @zachary_denham oh yeah 😛😛😛😛😛😛😛😛😛😛😛😛😛😛

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6yr ago

@krollja @zachary_denham @estrella_ordonez 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

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6yr ago

Hi @zachary_denham, really nice product and will answer a lot of needs I have! I tried Spinneret and I wasn't able to scrape the content I wish, I will try again but some documentation will be nice :-) Some remarks: - copy-paste doesn't work - impossible to modify of delete a track Thanks, Louis.

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6yr ago

@zachary_denham @louisdv been playing around with it and its pretty good. being able to edit or delete tracks would be nice though

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

@louisdv thanks for the feedback! To your notes: - Copy and paste is fixed and will deploy tomorrow in the AM! - Delete track button coming shortly thereafter. - Modifying tracks is a bit trickier, as websites are inherently stateful, so modifications are likely to break the track in unintended ways. What kind of modifications were you thinking?

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6yr ago

Avery, May I have your email? Mine is jycccwjc@yahoo.com Thanks!

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6yr ago

RipDB

Maker

@yahoo @jycccwjc zac@spinneret.co

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6yr ago

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