Have you seen the 'Packages' strip of XKCD? If not, check it out here: http://xkcd.com/576/.
Well, that comic's idea seemed so awesome, that I decided to write it... sort of...
My script will print out a random item from ebay that costs less than $5.00, that has free shipping, and that will let me "buy it now". I think it's pretty cool, but I'm not yet giving it access to my credit card, since there are a whole bunch of items out there where I have to contact the seller before bidding, since they want me to sign up for Verizon, or something... :(
I'm going to keep tinkering with this script. Hopefully, I'll get it to such a state that it can filter out items where I'd have to contact the seller first, and such... Then, and only then will I teach this baby to buy. :)
Anyways, enjoy the source. License is GPL 3.
Find any bugs? Made an improvement? Email me, please. :)
This is pretty cool, Ray. I just heard about a really cool Python module called mechanize (http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize). It's a module that encapsulates urllib, ClientForm, and ClientCookie among other modules to provide a fully featured browser within Python. Of course, there is no GUI, but you can do some pretty cool things with it :). Just thought you might like to read about it.
Wow, I hadn't heard about that... I'm sure that would help make the purchasing bit of this script easier to code... Plus it follows robots.txt files. It's always nice to make friendly spiders. :)