Turbo-Charging Robosoft with DynamicPAD (Part 3)

Last time in Part 2 I covered what at the end of it was essentially a useless Excel file. This time I’m going to show how to put that to work.

If you recall, the Excel file looked something like this:

And after it’s completed, it could look something like this:

Note there that the most important ones are at the top. That’s where you will want to customize your entries more. e.g. You will want to make sure that you have an excellent entry for Download.com as you’re probably going to want to spend the $100 for the listing rather than wait a year or whatever.

However, I would recommend doing all your mass submissions first, then going back and doing the most important sites like Download.com as you will have a bit of time to reflect and tweak your text more. During the submission process you will have ample opportunity to rethink things and come up with improvements. You’ll also likely think of things that didn’t occur to you before or you’ll find new ways to explain your product that are easier to understand and will get better results.

But I digress…

From the B1 cell, highlight and copy everything to the right and down. That is, copy it all except for the red Rank column.

Next, paste that into a plain text file and save it. You now have a simple tab-delimited text file that you can play with in “DynamidPAD Helper”, the little utility that you’ll use to create the [Dynamic_PAD] entry for your product. If you have questions, you can read through the source code as it is commented extensively.  But you probably don’t need to. You can just run it and use it with the text file that you created above.

Download DynamicPAD Helper (or click the screenshot below)

The DynamicPAD Helper download is a Visual Studio 10 C# solution, so you will need Visual Studio 10 for that. You can download the Express version of Visual Studio 10 here. It includes a debug build, so you can also just run that. It looks like this:

Just click the button, load the text file from above, then wait until it’s done in a few seconds.

Next, copy the output content. You need to paste that into the exported product DAT file from Robosoft.

To export a product from Robosoft, make sure you have the product selected in the main interface on the Products tab.

Next, click the Export button on the toolbar:

In the dialog, click the second “Export Product” button under “Robosoft / PADManager / Submit-Everywhere Data File” and save the DAT file:

You now have your DAT ready to open in a text editor.

Open your product.dat file in a text editor, preferably one with syntax high-lighting, and scroll down to the [Dynamic_PAD] INI entry. It looks like this:

[Dynamic_PAD]
General/DP_Script_Base_URL=http://www.supersimple.me/pad/
General/DP_Pad_Enabled=TRUE
General/DP_Distributive_Enabled=TRUE
General/DP_AtFormFill_Enabled=TRUE
General/DP_Pad_Mask=photo-resizer.xml
General/DP_Distributive_Mask=photo-resizer-setup.exe
General/DP_Distributive_Primary_URL=http://www.supersimple.me/Downloads/Photo-Resizer-Setup.exe
General/DP_ControlPanel_Login=loginname
General/DP_ControlPanel_Password=encoded password here
….THIS IS THE STUFF THAT YOU WANT TO REPLACE…

After that is the part that you want to replace. However, there are some INI entries below that you do not want to replace, so keep that in mind. You should see something like this after that section:

[Autosearch Info]

[ASBM Info]

So, paste the output from DynamicPAD Helper in the Dynamic_PAD section, being careful not to replace the parts listed above, then save the DAT file.

You now have the DAT ready to import back into Robosoft.

Click the Import button on the toolbar to get the new DAT file with the Dynamic_PAD information back into Robosoft. When you are prompted, overwrite the existing information.

At this point Robosoft is prepared for you to submit, but you still need to make sure that your DynamicPAD server is ready and that you have uploaded your DynamicPAD file.

NOTE: Your DynamicPAD file that you need to upload is NOT the same as the DAT file above.

Next time I’ll go over how to setup your DynamicPAD server, how to export and upload your DynamicPAD file.

Cheers,

Ryan