Conversion Matters

A fair few weeks ago I wanted to see if I could still code any Perl, which I’m glad to say [I think] I can, so I decided to port a little php script to Perl. For some reason I can’t access the original post/script anymore, but it was deStone’s delicious referral spammer - if you can get the link to work, your computer is better than mine!

So all it does is load up a list of keywords, go through each of the associated tag pages and then visit each site with any refer URL you want to promote.

It’s pretty pointless, I can’t imagine too many webmasters still look at old school stats packages, but I could be wrong.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

&main();

sub main {
	my $throttle = 10;
	my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
	$mech->agent_alias( 'Windows IE 6' );

	## get our list of keywords from the dictionary file
	open (KEYWORDS, '/Users/adam/Documents/Perl/dictionary.txt');
	my @tags;
	while () {
		my $tag = $_;
		chomp($tag); push(@tags,$tag);
	}
	close (KEYWORDS);

	my $url;
	my $result;

	## grab del.icio.us url for each tag
	foreach my $tag (@tags) {
		print “$tag\n”;
		$url = “http://del.icio.us/tag/” . $tag . “?setcount=100″;
		print “$url\n”;
		$mech->get( $url );
		$result = $mech->content;
		&process($result, $mech);
		sleep($throttle);
	}
}

## scrape del.icio.us for urls
sub process {
	my $result = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my @urls;
	my @links = $mech->links();
	foreach my $link (@links) {
		if ($link->url() =~ /^http/g && $link->url() !~ /del.icio.us/g) {
			#print $link->url() . “\n”;
			push(@urls,$link->url());
		}
	}

	&ref_spam(@urls);
}

## hit up each site with our url to promote as the referer
sub ref_spam {
	my @urls = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my $promote_url = “http://www.test.com”;
	$mech->add_header( Referer => $promote_url );

	foreach my $url (@urls) {
		$mech->get($url);
	}

}

[I’m aware it displays a bit messed up - you’ll have to deal with it.]

This no longer works for me ‘cos I’m in halls and would need to add proxy support, but I think it worked ;)!

Play around with it if you want; I’m not advocating any particular uses for it or being massively helpful on how to run it - deliberately.

I’m sure it could be improved upon - to use proxies, threads or made more OO but I only hacked it up to check I could still code Perl.

Here’s the dictionary file and the perl script (rename to .pl).