HELP! Need a genius programmer's opinion.
 

Ok, I need some opinions. Here's what I need to do. I run a mainstream company that brokers businesses and property sales. I need to take a listing and auto-post it to about a dozen sites we have memberships with.

For example, say we were a recruiter and we wanted to post a job posting to Monster, hotjobs, careerbuilder, etc. atuomatically without my girl having to copy-paste each one. Only I need to post a business for sale listing, not a job. But same thing. I have 27 branch offices, so we post like 20-50 a day! Manual posting is just too much.

Now, the old developer wrote a program in Delphi that basically is a browser (client side)which screen scrapes and mimics key entry page by page. The problem is that it's clunky, resource intensive, and only works 1/3 of the time. It also usually buchers the posting when it fails.

Any recommendations on how to approach the problem? Server side? PHP? or just get a better Delphi programmer? Any thoughts?

PHP is fine, as are Python or other server-side languages.

If they use captchas though, you will need an OCR script integrated to pass it.

Luckily they do not, but even if so, having my girl just have to type the passcode in would cut the time down 80%

just keep a cheap desktop pc up with a couple firefox browser windows all with the different sites in tabs, then download the free AutoIT program and have it map different tabs to keystrokes.

Does everyone have so much business that a developer does not want to step up and give a quote?

http://www.iopus.com has a free plugin for FIrefox, you record your macro ONCE then it is simple matter of replacing the text and then replay, it's very easy to figure it out

so you need to screenscrape your own sites and then post the listings to 3rd party sites?
or more, enter text/picture into a form and have the form then post them to 3rd party sites?

If CAPTCHAs are not involved, then this doesn't seem to hard - have the back end log into the 3rd party sites and then post the ad. A separate function hardcoded for each 3rd party site should handle that no problem, regardless of the language used.

I remember you asking for a delphi programmer before, so I assume this was the gig. Looks like you don't need a delphi programmer, just one that will rewrite this botched up job to work properly.