Just a quick update. This project very much alive, despite the long periods of time with no updates. As mentioned earlier, I've had a big client project I've been working on outside of my day job which has chewed up my time, and then the last couple of months has been screwed up because I took a contract job in London, which means I was down here during the week staying with a relative (but suffering up to four hours commute per day!) and travelling back home to Manchester on weekends, so all in all, available time seriously screwed recently. However the last few weeks, since I discovered a late bus I can catch back to where I'm staying, I've been staying back very late each night at work and remote desktopping into an EC2 dev machine I put together seeing as I hate developing on a laptop and my work PC has two monitors and a proper chair to sit in (as opposed to the terribly uncomfortable dining table chair I was trying to use where I was staying). Which means the first version of this automation system has really been coming together finally. I've been working on it as the first version is required as the client project I've been building requires it for part of its functionality and a similar service just doesn't exist. And to top it all off, we're (my girlfriend and I) moving here to London this weekend, so finally my outside-of-work time will be fixed and my commute will be practically eliminated (half hour each way).
Anyway, yeah yeah, "cool story bro".
Keep an eye on this thread, I'll have an early version to announce soon and will want some people to use this thing. The system's really fast and super scalable and has some fantastic scraping and data extraction features built in. Will post again soon.
