Increase your popularity on LinkedIn and rank #1 among your network.
In May 2014 LinkedIn introduced a new feature, How You Rank, which will show the most-viewed profiles among one's company and greater network.
This bot will allow you to rank #1 by visiting thousands of profiles, who will visit you in return (around 2.5% of them according to my tests).
Important: make sure that you have your Profile Viewing Setting changed from 'Anonymous' to 'Public' so LinkedIn members can see that you have visited them and can visit your profile in return. You also must change your language setting to English.
LInBot was developed under Pyhton 2.7.
Before you can run the bot, you will need to install a few Python dependencies.
Note: Python 2.7.9 and later (on the python2 series), and Python 3.4 and later include pip by default, so you may have pip already. Otherwise, you can install easy_install sudo apt-get install python-setuptools to install pip sudo easy_install pip.
- BeautifulSoup4, for parsing html:
pip install BeautifulSoup4 - Selenium, for browser automation:
pip install Selenium
If you plan to use Firefox (or Iceweasel) you don't need anything more.
For Chrome, first get the webdriver then put it in the same folder than the bot if you are on Windows, or in the /usr/bin folder if you are on OS X.
PhantomJS:
- On Windows, download the binary from the official website and put it in the same folder than the bot.
- On OS X Yosemite, the binary provided by the PhantomJS crew doesn't work (selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'Can not connect to GhostDriver'). You can either compile it by yourself or download the binary provided by the awesome eugene1g. Then put it in the
/usr/binfolder. - It's the same for Raspbian : compile it and put it in the
/usr/binfolder or download the binary provided by the awesome spfaffly.
If you want to built your own binaries, here is the build instructions for PhantomJS.
Before you run the bot, edit the config file to add your account login informations (email and password). It's that simple!
Once you have installed the required dependencies and edited the config file, you can run the bot.
Make sure you are in the correct folder and run the following command: python LInBot.py
On Windows you can usually just double-click bot.py to start the bot, as long as you have Python installed correctly.
Then, after choosing your favorite browser (for better performances, the light versions disable the loading of javascript, css and images), the bot will start visiting profiles.
The bot on my Raspberry Pi 2 B.
T: Number of profiles the bot tried to access;
V: Number of profiles the bot actually visited (profiles you can access: rank 3 or less);
Q: Number of profiles in queue.
If you want to know more about this project, check out my blog post :)