curl

cURL is amazing. If you're not familiar with this particular technology then let me introduce it now: cURL (and more specifically the PHP interface for cURL) allows the programmer to communicate with various servers using various different protocols. I've been using it recently to build webbots to automate some tedious tasks, and do things that no normal human user of the internet would ever want to do. Here's an example use of this technology, and how I went about building it...