Day 325: automating all the things

Today’s post was supposed to be the second part to my post about moving to Taiwan where I explain how to prepare and what to expect when you come here, but then… I got distracted.

There’s a section in the post about how to find a quarantine hotel that won’t break the bank, which turns out to be quite challenging because the government’s list of all the quarantine hotels is just a bunch of text and links to spreadsheets. If you want to sort them by price, good luck — the best I was able to do was use Cmd/Ctrl + F to search for increasing sequences of numbers (“1,0”, “1,1”, “1,2”) in the descriptions and click on each spreadsheet.

In the post I was writing, I was about to recommend doing that when I realized: Wait, why don’t I use Browserflow to scrape these spreadsheets?

So I did. Behold: all the Taiwan quarantine hotels sorted by price! (If you’re a Browserflow beta user and want to see how I did it, here’s the flow.) Browserflow gets the data from each spreadsheet, finds the lowest price for foreigners, and compiles it all into its own spreadsheet.

Two other ways I used Browserflow today:

Filling out my daily temperature form

Every day, I need to fill out a Google Form that reports my temperature as part of the quarantine process. I thought I’d at least automate as much as I can so I quickly whipped a flow together:

Updating all my contacts in Google Contacts

After I arrived in Taiwan, some of my contacts’ names stopped showing up in Messages and I started seeing their phone numbers instead. It turns out that since I sync my contacts from Google Contacts and some of those numbers don’t have country codes, my iPhone isn’t able to resolve them correctly when in a new country. I wanted to add “+1” to all the phone numbers that didn’t already have a country code, but I didn’t want to sit around clicking on each contact. But you know what’s good at sitting around clicking buttons without getting bored? Browserflow! (No recording here because I’m not trying to dox all my friends and I haven’t yet bothered to populate a dummy account just to record a demo.)

Getting Instagram Leads

Oh, and there was something I built for someone else. A friend introduced me to a friend who wants to use Browserflow to automate collecting leads, so I made a little demo of that, too:

There’s still a ton of room for improvement (offering multiple ways to select an element, making it easier to record a flow instead of manually building it, still some bugs with single-page apps, performance still needs work, etc.) but overall, I’m really happy with what I’ve built. This thing is way cool.

yup today’s post is me getting drunk off my own kool-aid and talking about how great it is