Macro for Online Contests

hen I find a new passion, it absorbs me completely so it took a little while until I realized these macros could do other things for me. In fact, it took me until just this week to realize that I could use macros to enter online sweepstakes. I found a number of legitimate contests with valuable prizes and wrote macros to enter me as often as the rules allow. Sure, the odds are against me but I'm entered. Are you? And it's costing me NOTHING but a few minutes a week to make sure I stay entered.

Special tip: do you blog? Write a macro to automatically bring up and log in to your Squidoo lenses, SquidU, Twitter, Lensroll, Digg, and storefront page all at once in separate tabs.

his is so easy you're going to laugh....or not. Maybe you'll smirk because you knew this existed all along. Or maybe you'll groan if you've actually been manually voting for something online and just started thinking about the time and hassle you could have saved yourself:

Computer

iMacros add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer (it's FREE!)

o download the add-on, follow the appropriate link (fyi - for a whole host of reasons, I prefer Firefox for this task as I'll explain later):

• For Firefox: iMacros for Firefox



• For Internet Explorer: iMacros for Internet Explorer

Why this add-on and not some recorder software? Because these add-ons are built to work within a browser vs. many recorder programs which copy mouse moves and clicks but do not interact with the browser itself and, therefore, don't react based on the the status of your browser but click on unaware when the page your trying to act on hasn't even come up yet. Those recorders are great for other tasks, though. I have one, I use it regularly, and I love it.

ake sure the iMacros icon shows in your browser toolbar (see the #1 in the photo). If you don't see the actual iMacros toolbar running down the left-hand side of your browser (see the #2 in the photo), then click on the iMacros icon so the iMacros toolbar pops up.

Bring up the contest website where you want to apply your macro. Make sure you are on the page on which you actually vote, not just the site's main page if they're different. Now, press "Record" on the iMacros toolbar, take whatever steps you have to take on the website to enter a vote, and then hit "Stop" on the iMacros toolbar. All the actions you make with your mouse between hitting "Record" and "Stop" are recorded by iMacros including the URL of the website page on which you are voting.

SAVE your macro! Give it a name that you will easily remember for this task such as "Vote Kelly" if you happen to be voting for your best friend Kelly in the "Best Friends Named Kelly" contest. (Notice I have macros to vote for many people but I only mentioned voting for my friend's daughter? I got so involved in this particular contest that I was voting for her competitors, too! So many talented people out there...)

TIP: I deleted all the pre-written macros that came with iMacros to make it easier to find my own. I've never missed them.

ow it's time to turn your macro on! This is called "playing" your macro. iMacros is flexible enough to allow you to run your macro once or to run a loop and replay the macro as many as 99,999 times. If you push "Play" (see the #1 in the photo), the macro will run once and finish when the web page has completed reloading.

If you want the macro to "loop" (play repeatedly), enter the number of times you want the macro to run under "Max" (see the #2 in the photo) and press "Play Loop". The "Current" box counts along to show you how many times the loop has played so far.

If the contest you are voting in only allows you to vote once a day you can do one of two things:

ccasionally, my macro would stop running:

Stuff moves! When the webmaster changes something on the website - new banners, sizes and placement of ads - it can move the positioning of the vote button. Your macro doesn't know any better and will continue to hit the wrong area of your screen. Periodically test your macro and watch it complete to make sure it's running properly.

Your computer does other stuff on its own. Remember eons ago when you set up your computer to automatically run a virus scan or to download new updates on some sort of schedule? That can stop your macro. Either go in and change those schedules or just remember to check your macro daily and restart it if necessary.

How did I outpace other macro-runners in the contest? I ran multiple Firefox browser windows all running the iMacros voting macro. At my peak, I was running 10-14 Firefox windows and 5 Internet Explorer windows. This required some tweaks in Firefox and IE (which I won't go into now) and also required some additional monitoring (meaning more of my time) because, as I mentioned, IE was a little less reliable but it was faster and sometimes I needed the speed.

iMacros waits until your page has finished reloading before it replays the macro. I did find a faster macro software that would allow me to rapidly revote without waiting for the page to finish. This, however, resulted in my IP being locked out of the website. The website's server classified such rapid hits as a possible security threat. Lesson learned: just because you can go faster doesn't always mean you should. (I recovered, by the way, but that's another story....)

kay, so maybe you don't really care about online contests, singing contests, eating contests or any contests at all. The really cool thing is that once I became familiar with the macro program, I discovered it could be used for all kinds of other, more responsible, adult-like tasks: download and save account statements, test web site response times, update online auction pages repeatedly to track activity, open and log-in to all your favorite websites....endless number of uses.