Shally's Alley Live - Deep Dive into recent /Magical release

Well, hello everybody! Welcome to Shally's Alley. It's Friday, March 18th, in this wonderfully dreary— yeah, I know you can't tell because of my fake background, but if I showed you what my real background is, you probably would spiral into a depression. It's been raining all week here, and it's pretty dark. It almost looks like it's past sunset right now outside. So, well, what are we doing today? I want to go into Magical again. For those of you that don't remember or did not watch my last episode on Magical, Magical is a free extension for Chromium-based browsers like, of course, Chrome and any other Chromium-based. If you follow this link down here. I don't know if that's actually a link, but go to srcn.co/magical. You will be taken to srcn.co/magical and redirected to where you can actually download this. Again, it is free. All of this is free. The reason I'm so high on it right now is because they just released a new update, and I I have the distinct honor of being number 1 on the list of getting that new release, which allows for multiple paste into, for example, Google Sheets. And that's what I wanna show you today. I'm gonna start from scratch. Let me share my screen here. Let's do the picture-in-picture that we did last time. I think that worked out pretty good. There we go. Sorry for that dizzy spell there. I'm going to start from scratch, and what I have in front of me here is a simple Google Sheet. Just using this as an example because it's accessible to everybody essentially, and what I'm going to do is go to a profile. Pretend that this is a list of Facebook pages or LinkedIn profiles or CRM, uh, contacts, whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is. You could be in your CRM, etc. It's the same thing as we talked about last time. You can actually set up shortcuts for any page, and once that shortcut has been set up for any user on Magical, all users have access to it. You can of course customize your own version, but basically I started with— somebody had already done parsing of the Twitter page. And you can see that they had labeled fields such as followers, following, full name, headline, location, username, etc. And I just broke up the first and last name and added a little bit more just in case, you know, you wanted to capture that information. So once you've mapped these out, which is very easy, all you do is click on Edit Variables, and then you can click on something here, like for example this, and say, uh, followed by, and save it, and that now adds a new field to your list of variables. Come on. There it is. So that's it. I've now customized it. I'm going to close this window over here. Not close it, but shrink it and show you what we need to do to set it up. So to set this up, we're going to go over to Excel and just add the forward slash command. So slash slash. You can see that it brings up the Twitter page. Now there are a bunch of other Twitter pages here because I have a bunch of these open. A page has to be open. This is important. A page has to be open on your tabs on the same browser window or the same browser instance in order for this to work. It's pulling from your open tabs. And I think the first one here was Daniel. So let's see if I can go to the one that I was just using, which was Graham. There's Jen, Sanaz, where's Graham? Ah, there's Graham. Okay. So that's the one that I was just on there. And we have full name, et cetera. I'm gonna show more value— okay, more variables and scroll down to select first name. I don't see it. There it is. Okay, so that's first name. Then for the next one, I'm gonna do slash slash. And let's look at last name, show more variables, last name. Wait, is that the right one? I think so. All right, slash slash. Oh boy, I got the wrong one. I got the wrong one. Okay, let me start over here. Slash slash. Where is our— shouldn't have opened so many, I got a little excited. So this is the last name. Okay, then this is the followed by. Okay, and slash slash, Graham. Remind me to make sure I'm looking at Graham each time. Where'd he go? Danny Greenhouse. Show all fields. Okay, lesson learned, don't have as many things open as you think you All right, next time I'm gonna not do that. Well, anyway, here it is. I'm gonna eventually find Graham. All right, so we got first name, the last name, we got followed by. Let's do followers next, slash slash Graham following. Next one, slash slash Graham. Show more variables. We'll do headline. This is from their Twitter headline, slash slash, bam, more variables. Let's do location, slash slash, bam, more variables, Twitter handle, and let's do the URL. Oops. That's the URL for the Twitter profile. Next, I want to also do the URL or the website, so the website that's linked on there. Profile, which is different than the URL for the actual Twitter profile. So that'll be this right here. And why not, let's also add the age of the profile, so like when they joined, since we have that. Um, just figured I might as well add it. Okay, so we've done all of those. So this is first name, just showing you how I would set this up. Last name, followed by— this is followers, following, headline, location, handle or whatever username, um, Twitter and website, and joined on. All right, so these are our headers. So now if I go down here and do slash slash, it says fill all remaining rows. This is the magic, okay? I know it took me a little bit to figure this out because I had to go back and look at Graham, but hopefully, um, you don't make that mistake. Lesson learned. Now I'm going to say fill all remaining Twitter rows, and what it's going to do is grab the same information from the other tabs that I have open. So that should be at least 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 tabs. Well, 7. And so I'm going to hit enter, and look at that, it just grabs all of the information. Some profiles may not have some of that information, and it just leaves it blank, but where they do have it, it fills it out. And that's magical. Now you have fully parsed all of those profiles, which is, I think, just pretty amazing. All you would need to do then is go back and let's close some of these out. These are the ones that I had, uh, open before. Closing them out. And let's pull up, um, another list. Let's see who this person is following. Okay, so let's see, open that one. By the way, if you're wondering what I'm doing, I am left-clicking while using the Window, Control, or Apple, whichever, and that'll essentially open in the background so that it opens up another tab. Let's see what else we got here. There's another one. There's another one. Just gonna open a few more of these. Okay, that's good. Let's see what else is over here. Uh, 5 followers, okay. Let's see, new business developer. There's a software engineer. Okay, good enough. We can close that one out. And oh, there's a lot here. I don't know if I want to go through these. This is quite a bit. I am going to— oh, there's a good one. Let's see. Following? Who are they retweeting? They are retweeting Brad Fitzpatrick, Faith Arslan, John Calhoun. I'm just scanning some profiles here. To look for. What I'm looking for is profiles of individuals, not profiles of like events and things like that. That is another strategy you could use, but for this type of parsing, I'm trying to get names and so on, as opposed to a, you know, list of maybe other accounts that I should be following, etc. So that's a different strategy. Here's another one. Oh, I already have Steve. From before. Okay, I think this is pretty good. That's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 more. All right, good. I'm going to close this one and I'm going to close this one. So now all the ones that are open are ones that I want to parse. If I go back over here and simply hit slash slash, it's going to say fill all remaining rows. Boom. Look at that. And there it is. So I have now essentially created a spreadsheet out of the profiles that are parsable from this list of about 10 or so. Some of these I didn't really necessarily wanna capture like that one. That's okay. I can just delete that one. This is actually a list, not a profile. You can see because that's what it says there on the URL. This is also a list, not a profile. Let's see if any of these other ones are— the rest of these are good. Some of them don't have all of the information like followed by, and that's okay. When it doesn't have followed by, that's because there are no people that I follow that follow them. It's kind of like there's no mutual connections, um, and so on. I'm not really sure what these are, so I'm just going to delete them. And there it is. I now have a parsed list. Easy to take this and upload it to, for example, Swordfish or one of the other applications, and then enhance them and add additional contacts to this. Very, very, very easy. So let's go ahead, and I'm going to close these out. I'm going to show you one more example. I know we talked a lot about Twitter, so I'm not going to do Twitter. Let's do maybe something that is more like a, um, let's say maybe a CRM or something would be interesting. Uh, I have an idea. How about Facebook? Let's go to Facebook. Ah, I'm not logged in. That's okay. Well, why not? Let's just do LinkedIn just in case. Let's say that you want to parse maybe a list of groups or something like that. So we'll go into LinkedIn. Everybody knows how to parse profiles, but you may not know how to parse groups. So we'll go in here and do a search for Golang. It's a programming language. You can search for anything you want, and I'm going to use the groups bubble. Which now brings up a list of Golang groups. So here's golang-nuts. All right, I'm going to open that one. So the first thing that you want to do is to map the fields. So for that, just expand your Magical, go to variables, and it looks like these are already kind of automatically flagged from previous mappings of LinkedIn, but I don't think anybody's actually mapped a group page. So let's go ahead and edit the variables, and we're going to start with this one, which will be LinkedIn group name. Save it. And this one will be number of members. Save. And this one will be, let's call it the group description. Save. And then let's do the admin, admin name. Save. And then maybe the admin, admin job title. Save. If there was anything else in here that you'd want to parse, like maybe highlights or something like that, you can add that. But we have a few fields ready to go, so we're done. Now we need to go and create a spreadsheet. So let's do a new spreadsheet, a new Google Sheet, and we'll map those same fields. Let's go ahead and find a few other groups. There's Golang Developers, Golang Engineers and Architects, Go Developer Community, Golang. See what else we can find. Why not React Developers? Golang Programming. All right, that's good enough. So we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 groups. I usually start on the second row so that after I completely build this, I can go back and then add the, the column headings. The first one we're going to do is and it says Golang programming jobs. Okay, so we're going to call this the admin name. This is administrator name. Okay, then the next one will be The admin job title. Perfect. Then the next one will be, uh, group name. And let's see, group description. By the way, once you build this once, you can use it over and over again. And number of members. What else do we have here? Show more variables. We have the URL. Oh, there's a couple of URLs. Hmm. Okay, let's add that keyword, and I'm just going to add one of these URLs. We don't need to add all of them, but once you figured out— I should have probably looked into which ones these are, so I'll just pick the first one. But you can see how you can easily— oh, there we go, that's the, it's the group URL. Okay, so group URL, perfect, done. Now all I got to do is do slash slash and fill the remaining, and boom, look at that, done. How cool is that? Next time around, I just need to open up this spreadsheet and it's already been pre-programmed. So I'm going to add a bunch more groups. Let's go back and do a search for groups, and we'll say PHP developers and look for groups. Wow, that's a good one. Big one there. Web developers, Android, Developer Java. Okay, next. Cypress, PHP, PHP in Ahmedabad, Nepal. I don't know what SilverStripe is. Let's just keep going. Some of these groups are getting sort of small. Oh, Open Source Web Developers. I like that one. That's about 5. Boston Web Developers, Full Stack Developers, 6, 7. Full Stack Developers, Boot Up by New York, 8. I want to find 2 more. Do we get 2 more? Hmm, all right, let's do, um, Gopher. Gophers are Go developers. Sometimes also a sport team. Let's see, there's not a whole lot. Okay, that's fine. West Midlands area. Okay. Birmingham. Okay. In the UK. Got it. How about GopherCon? The conference? Nope. Okay. Go— conference. Oh, developers? Oh, that's a good one. There we go. I don't think I had that one before. Okay, good, I've got a bunch more. So all I did is open these up in the background, that's it. Now I can go back over here. Let's pretend I hadn't left it open, I just closed the sheet and I pulled it back up here and this is LinkedIn groups. Simply click inside of the next row box, slash slash, fill all remaining, and whammo! How cool is that? So folks, this works with anything. If you have a CRM profile that you want to— CRM profiles you want to put into a spreadsheet so that you can upload into an ATS, or from an old ATS to a new ATS, or from basically a, you know, a website that you belong to, like a membership-based website, and you want to grab profiles from there, This is basically web scraping, but the difference is that each individual page has to be open as a tab, and that's not that hard to do. One of the things that I wanted to show you today as well, since I'm talking about opening up individual pages, is there is an app on the Chrome Store, or a Chromium app called Link Clump. That's this one right here. And this app allows you to grab a bunch of hyperlinks and do things with it. For example, you can copy them into your clipboard. You can also add them to your favorites folder, or you can open them so it'll become tabs. Let's say that we can find a list of go— developer conferences or user groups. How about that? List of Go developer user groups. I'll take it. Best developer groups to join. Okay, great. So here's a bunch of groups. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Use this link clump. All you have to do is create the definition of what you want to do. I've got 3 different ones, you can have as many as you want. This one opens them as new tabs, this one copies them to my clipboard, and this one puts them in my bookmarks, my favorites. This is something that you can define, so you can edit it, right? You can say which mouse button do you want, left, you want right, and which keyboard key and then what to do with it. Do you wanna open them as tabs, copy to clipboard, et cetera? You can even open them in a new window. So I'm gonna have this open with left X. I'm gonna have this open as tabs. You can even exclude certain ones or only include certain ones. Pretty powerful tool. So now that you know what I'm doing, I'm gonna grab these by basically doing left click and X. You can see it's highlighting them, and I'm just gonna scroll down. To all of these. Sorry, I unclicked for some reason. Start that over. Okay, I'm going to scroll down to all of these, and remember, I could be copying these to a clipboard, I could be putting these in my folders, or I could be simply, um, you know, adding them to whatever I want. But basically at this time, what I want to do is open them up as new tabs since I was showing you that from that LinkedIn list of groups or from a Twitter list of users or etc. So you can see here I'm grabbing all of these. There we go. And that's it. Boom. It's opened all of them. I don't know if you can see that, but there they are, each one of them. So if I had created a parser for this, then the parser would go in and grab all of these. Pretend that these are all Facebook profiles or they're all CRM profiles or whatever. And that's it. So between Link Clump and Magical, you have the perfect storm of opening all your tabs up and then essentially scraping or capturing all that information. If it's a web page, it can be scraped. So there you have it, folks. That is our chat for today. I hope you find that useful. Drop me a note or leave comments in and let me know what kind of automation you wanna see in the future, and I will make sure and find some way to demonstrate that. Take care, everybody. Have a great weekend.