Hi Everyone

This is my first post here and I hope I will be able to get some assistance.

I use a website called Rent A Coder to book certain types of jobs for my company; if any of you have used this site, you would know that it's communication center leaves little to be desired. For a company that places 20-50 bids per day and has literally hundreds of communications with prospective clients there, their organization of these communications is sloppy at best.

I want to increase productivity for my staff by extracting all of the communications that we have on RAC (rentacoder.com) and posting them on a web page that would be hosted on my companies site.

What would be the best way of going about this?

A few particulars:

• RAC needs to be logged into in order for you to see your "communications".
• There is a dropdown menu once in the communications center to select whether or not you want to see "bids you've placed", "projects your working on", "projects you've completed" and "projects your just communicating with the client about".

I would like to extract each of these different communications and display them in separate columns or pages. I would also like the project titles to retain their URL's back to RAC so my employees can click them and be routed back to RAC to leave a comment or something of that nature.

I'm not asking for someone to flat out do this for me, (if you want to... great ); rather help me in the thought process and put me on the right track coding wise to achieve this.

Thanks for all your help in advance!

I've thought about using data extraction programs that i've found on the internet, but i'd rather not have a downloaded .exe that i am required to run in order to achieve this. I'd rather have a script or some sort that automatically extracts the data and parses it out when my employee logs in or clicks an update button or something like this.

Anyone have any words of advice for me?

In your position, I would just write a little screen scrapper and a standalone app

However, based on your description, you may be able to get further using either greasemonkey or chickenfoot scripts. The chicken foo may get you going a bit faster.

references:
Chickenfoot
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/chickenfoot/
chickenfoot video (give this a watch)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...nfoot&total=35

Greasemonkey
http://www.greasespot.net/

If you are interested in tool development (like a standalone), let me know.

Thanks for the idea willcode.

Preferably I would like to create a script that does this, something that will run from within my company website for my employees to use and something that they will not have to download a client or script files for.

I am also open to the idea of hiring someone to do this for me. If there is a programmer out there willing to do this, please PM me with a quote.

If there are any other suggestions out there for me to try on my own, I would also appreciate those as I would like to learn how to do this myself.

Need a 5th post in order to send PM's.


Anyone able to help me out with this problem?