A Package Deal For Your Customers

It’s so cool that UBot Studio can compile completely stand-alone bots. We know lots of people who’ve started whole businesses building them.

But wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically include all the files necessary to run your bots in a nice professional installer package that you could send to your customers or clients?

In UBot Studio 5, you’ll be able to do this in a matter of seconds.

With the new Create Installer option, you will now very quickly be able to build compressed stand-alone install packages out of your scripts, and also include any files you need (Text, XML, etc) for them to run. Of course you’ll also be able to include your software’s name and a banner image for the installer.

One other thing – when your bots first run on your customers’ machines, they often connect to our server to download required UBot Studio files. This isn’t always feasible. It’s hard for those with slow connections, and from time to time, it can set off false virus alerts. And, your customer doesn’t want to see multiple install windows and become confused.

So, you’ll also now be able to include all the necessary files required to run, right in your installer.

Pretty cool, huh?

I can’t wait for you to see what’s coming next week…

Seth Turin
UBot Studio

– Seth

The Regular Expression Builder and Spintax Editor in UBot Studio 5

This week we decided to splurge and let you know about two features that are going to be in the new UBot Studio 5. The first is a very simple way to find data on websites or in text. For example – maybe you want to find all of the email addresses or web addresses from a web page or CSV file. UBot Studio has a nice scrape function that already lets you do this. Our scraper looks for occurrences of text between other examples of text. While this works a lot of the time, sometimes you just want to find every example of something on a page, regardless of what it’s between.

If you give yourself a few minutes to learn Regular Expressions, you’ll find a whole world opened up of really cool things you can scrape, which our scraper would find difficult. So with that in mind–and knowing that many of you already use the RegEx engine that’s inside of UBot Studio–there will be a really cool Regular Expression Builder inside UBot Studio 5:

The Regular Expression Builder in UBot Studio 5

The Regular Expression Builder in UBot Studio 5

If you aren’t at all familiar with Regular Expressions, and the phrase is giving you chills, relax,  it’s easier than you think. We already have a 3-part instructional video which will help you if you decide to dive in. But here’s a simple way to explain it:

(w+)@(w+.)(w+)(.w+)?

I know that doesn’t seem simple–but that phrase will find you most email addresses. Here’s how.

Let’s start at the beginning. (w+) simply means find any one or more character word. The w says “Go out and find every instance of anything that is a letter, number, or underscore,” and the + means it must be at least one character in length but can be more. Putting this expression on either side of the @ symbol means find at least one word that contains one or more characters, then the @ symbol, then another word, followed by the “.” – ie, find anything that looks like “word@domain.”.

The next portion – (w+) – you’ve already seen. With that addition, our regular expression is looking for anything along the lines of “word@domain.com” (or, “whatever@address.net”, “email@server.org”, etc).

But what about .co.uk addresses?  (.w+)* says that we’re looking for a period followed by one or more word characters. But what’s the * after the end parentheses mean? *  means that the preceding metacharacter, literal or group can occur zero or more times. As an example, wd* would match a word character followed by zero or more digits. In our example, we use parentheses to group together a series of metacharacters, so the * applies to the whole group. So, you can interpret (.w+)* as ‘match a period followed by one or more word characters, and match that combination zero or more times’. The goal here is that not all email addresses have a .co.uk ending–but some do. So using the .w+ expression, we can find email addresses that end in .com, net.au, etc.

The UBot Studio 5 RegEx Builder will include common expressions like this one, to make this sort of thing easy for everyone.

The second feature that we’ll be adding is a Spintax Editor:

The Spintax Editor in UBot Studio 5

The Spintax Editor in UBot Studio 5

(Spintax is a simple way to randomize your content. It’s easy: Simply put phrases or words that mean roughly the same thing inside of brackets, like this: {hello|hi|g’day} and when you spin the text, you’ll get any one of those words or phrases back! While it’s true that *poorly* spun content is a terrible idea, high quality spun content is hard to detect. So we’re expanding our Spintax Engine and adding a simple feature to help you build Spintax articles. This nifty Editor will let you create articles using a built-in thesaurus, so you shouldn’t have to spend extra money on any additional spinning service in the future. It’ll be a snap to build articles right inside UBot Studio with this new feature.

 

We’re just getting started on the awesome that is UBot Studio 5. I look forward to updating you again next week!

 

xkcd agrees–Regular Expressions are a powerful thing

 

– Seth

Yes! Yes! YES!

HEY!

OK, so I’m really excited. Here’s why:

In two months, we’re going to release UBot Studio 5.0.

Its new features will help you build faster, more complex applications, but just like the rest of UBot Studio, they’ll be easy to use and control. I know you’re going to love them.

And no matter what Edition you have, you’re going to get a bunch of amazing new features.

What are the new features?

Every week, starting today, I’m going to tell you about a new feature that’ll be in UBot Studio 5. I’ll explain why we added it, and how it will help you reach internet marketing mastery. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook page for these updates as well.

I’m excited to help each of you by improving UBot Studio in ways that, four years ago, I never would have imagined. I’ve heard so many success stories. I’ve watched UBot become the most popular internet marketing software around. I’m ready to keep it growing, and keep you growing, and UBot Studio 5.0 is going to do that very, very soon.

Yours,

– Seth

PS – Today we added FTP functionality to UBot Studio, for Pro and Dev users. Hope you enjoy it! (If you’re not subscribed to updates, click here and do that!)

 

Turning Ideas Into Tangible Results

The internet is playground of ideas.

There are all sorts of great ideas being tossed back and forth among people at any time. Forums, blogs, skype groups, masterminds, friends, even competitors’ websites–it can be a constant struggle to wade through it all. Remember: ideas are only as useful as what their thinkers do with them. To make those ideas useful and tangible, it is important – and necessary – to have a well thought-out plan for how you want that idea to manifest.

ubot woman_face_confused

It can be hard to get to your goals.

 

The way to do that is to lay out exactly what your ultimate goal is and exactly what you need to get to your goal. Instead of reading another blog post or making another forum post, lay out your plan. After you’ve laid out your plan clearly, and you have the tools you need for the plan, you can then carefully execute the plan and make changes along the way if needed.

I have a really simple process for how to get this done with most simple goals. Let’s go through each step in the process!

The Ultimate Goal

Let’s say your idea’s goal is to help you build your twitter or Facebook account with content that is useful and valuable to your followers. For us, that means giving useful tech/UBot Studio related news every day or two and continuing to update regularly. By stating that goal, you can start making plans towards that goal. A clear goal will ensure that the result you get is the result you want.

Write Out a Plan

Write down the exact steps you need to take to get to your goal.

In this case, you will need to find and gather great content on topics that are relevant to your twitter or Facebook audience. (We do this every day, and you can see the result at www.facebook.com/LikeUBot.) After doing so, you want to place that content on your twitter or Facebook account. You might need tools to help you gather all the content you need, store the content and then post the content to the appropriate twitter or Facebook account. The tools you use to accomplish your goal are going to determine how fast your plan is executed and how well it is executed.

Get to Know Your Tools

So you’ve found some tools that might help you with your processes. Research their features and figure if the tools have what you need for your processes. Be specific about exactly how the tool can help you. (We use Hootsuite for managing Social Media.)

What feature in the tool will allow you to find your content? (To find content, we use tech news sites, twitter, and tumblr to find relevant news items, and then of course we think about commonly asked questions in support and on the forum to help write interesting UBot Studio-related posts and updates.)


What feature in the tool will save the content after the content has been found? (
Hootsuite lets you save content for future dates.)

What specific feature in the tool will help you post the content to facebook or twitter? (Autosaving login data and calendars for automated posting makes taking a day off here and there really easy!)

Execute Your Plan

ubot-woman-jump-joy

Success!

Put your plan into action and observe the results. (I recommend starting without tools, and then when you find yourself needing them, grab the one that best suits your needs. This is because it’s hard to know what your needs are until you build up an actual history of trying to accomplish your goal and saying, “I really wish I had something to help me do this!) You might need to make changes along the way in terms of what content resonate better with your audience. A great idea is adaptable and changeable. Be ready to study the results of the steps you’ve taken and make changes as you go. The world, especially the internet world, changes everyday, and as a result you will need to revisit your plan and make sure you are using the latest tools and methods to meet your objective.

Remember that all ideas are just ideas, unless you take action. And though taking action is commendable, having a well thought out plan will determine how much your idea grows into something valuable and tangible. Remaining flexible and being willing to make changes to your plan along the way will make sure your plan remains solid and you get closer to your goal.

– Lilly

Seeing the Future vs Foreseeing It

This is cool.

VentureBeat alerted me to the death of the creator of the mouse, Doug Engelbart, which is a shame (although he was 88). What I didn’t know about was his famous 1968 demo/presentation, which is one of the founding bases for all GUI’s that came since. It basically revolutionized what people imagined a computer could be capable of:

At the time of his demo in December, 1968 — since referred to as the Mother of All Demos because of its scope and influence — computers were used primarily for computing and tabulating mostly numeric data.

Like Steve Jobs and Apple after him, Engelbart had the vision to not only describe what computers might be capable of, like a science fiction writer would, but to actually show it off in this “Mother of All Demo’s.” To put it another way, he didn’t just help people foresee the future, he helped them actually see it.

Skip to 54:00 and check it out for a few minutes. Along with a mouse, they basically demonstrate hyperlinks, which seems pretty blase now, but if you can imagine what computers were like in 1968 – “impersonal boxes that read punched cards, whir[red] awhile, then spit out reams of teletype paper,” according to Wired, this demonstration must have been absolutely otherworldly. He also shows off things like windows and version control and text and graphics on the same screen. This is mind-altering stuff. It just wasn’t what people thought of.

There’s a great breakdown of all the individual sections of the demo here: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html, that’s at least worth scrolling through to get a sense of how amazing this video really was, and how impactful.

Early hip hop lyrics?

Engelbart was working to improve the interaction of people and computers–basically, trying to make people work better and smarter through technology.

While most computer scientists concentrated on making computers smart (artificial intelligence), Engelbart was interested in how computers could make humans smarter, or what he called augmented intelligence.

Our company has a much, much smaller goal, but one that I think Engelbart would appreciate. If a computer can do the hard work for you, why not make programming easier? Why not allow anyone to create their own applications? Why not show people that they can do more with computers by showing them the future instead of just telling them about it.

Apparently Arthur C. Clarke, the famous sci-fi writer of 2001: A Space Odyssey, came by the lab where this demo and computer tech was being created, and after they showed him what it did, he said, “I write all kinds of things about the science fiction future, but I never thought of anything like this!”

I like to think that it’s our job here at Seth Turin Media, Inc, to present ideas that no one has thought of yet. Our goal isn’t financial success, but changing the world.

 

– Seth