Show IH: Boxkite.io - Automate web tasks with simple scripts
Hey IH! You might remember me from the post about Page.REST in last September
Since Page.REST, I released two similar APIs - Screen.rip & PDF.cool. These micro-APIs attracted more than 100 paid customers and were a great way to strike conversations with customers.
From these conversations, we understood there are lots of grunt tasks people have to do on the web - updating legacy websites, bulk form fillings, monitoring competitors' products, creating media for social sharing, generating PDF invoices, etc.
Some people have tried to automate these with home-grown Selenium / PhantomJS scripts. But they are hard to maintain and error-prone. So we thought how about we create a cloud-based browser infrastructure which can be scripted via a simple DSL (domain-specific language).
The result is - Boxkite
We would love to give early preview access to IndieHacker community. I believe it can be a productive tool for many of you and we will get good insights.
Oh, one more thing, we also feel there's an opportunity for creating a marketplace for automation scripts built on top of Boxkite. Users can find and run pre-built scripts (aka tasks) that they need and contributors can benefit from distribution channel and a revenue stream based on usage. It's kinda similar to what I did with Page.REST, Screen.rip & PDF.cool but without having to worry about distribution & managing subscriptions. What do you think? Would you be interested in getting involved?
Hey Lakshan, I just signed up to automate my screenshot taking process. Hopefully that'll save me 45mins every Monday.
It will! Sending another batch of invites today.
This is very cool. I tried to build something like this before with no luck. Can't wait to try it out.
Thanks Emile. Will send you an invite today.
Already got one from Wendell. Spent some time with it today and sent a long email with my feedback :)
That's awesome! Thanks a lot.
Wow! Very interesting. These are things which make your mind go immediately... What can I build using this..?
One answer please, Please guide me get the SSL from Let's encrypt w/ cPanel. Any advise / steps?
Hey Shree, hope you'll find Boxkite useful.
Sorry I didn't understand the last bit about getting SSL from Let's encrypt. Can you drop me an email to lakshan [at] pragmalabs.co, explaining your use case? That'll help me to understand what exactly you need.
Interesting idea.
Why DSL and not let run JavaScript?
Unsolicited marketing advice: you should build a fair amount of scripts to demonstrate usefulness.
Things that can be useful for many people like scraping a balance of Wells Fargo account etc.
Thanks for the advice!
We had to make a compromise over "let's create more samples" vs "let's ship what we have and let the market figure out possibilities". But we'll continue to add more real-world examples in the coming days. It's easier now as we have a fairly good idea of what kind of tasks people want to do.
We took the DSL approach since we found not everyone is comfortable with JavaScript. Also, it's harder to maintain multiple language bindings as Selenium. So we took inspiration from SQL and decided to ship a language agnostic DSL which can be used in any language/framework.
That said, you can run JavaScript within the context of the browser. There's a DSL command called
evaluatewhich takes a JS code block as an input.(BTW, did you work at Nitrous for a brief period? Your handle
kjkis familar)Yep, I'm the same kjk.
Very interesting. I'm curious to see how this develops. Can you go into more detail about the dev automation script marketplace?
Hey Victor, we are currently collecting the early interest for the marketplace. We believe lots of the automation tasks are common enough to be reusable (update a page in a CMS, track SEO rankings, etc.)
So we want to invite the developers like you, who may have worked previously on such tasks (and felt their pains) to write shareable scripts. You would be able to set a price for the script and get paid every time someone runs your script.
Awesome, you'll have to post again when that feature is live!
This is wonderful! Just signed up for preview :)
Thanks! Will send you an invite soon.