Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged github, gitscraping

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Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks

Mastodon is definitely having a moment. User growth is skyrocketing as more and more people migrate over from Twitter.

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Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes

I figured out a GitHub Actions pattern to keep track of a file published somewhere on the internet and automatically open a new repository issue any time the contents of that file changes.

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Scraping web pages from the command line with shot-scraper

I’ve added a powerful new capability to my shot-scraper command line browser automation tool: you can now use it to load a web page in a headless browser, execute JavaScript to extract information and return that information back to the terminal as JSON.

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Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their --help using Git

I’ve been experimenting with a new variant of Git scraping this week which I’m calling Help scraping. The key idea is to track changes made to CLI tools over time by recording the output of their --help commands in a Git repository.

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Weeknotes: CDC vaccination history fixes, developing in GitHub Codespaces

I spent the last week mostly surrounded by boxes: we’re completing our move to the new place and life is mostly unpacking now. I did find some time to fix some issues with my CDC vaccination history Datasette instance though.

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Flat Data. New project from the GitHub OCTO (the Office of the CTO, love that backronym) somewhat inspired by my work on Git scraping: I’m really excited to see GitHub embracing git for CSV/JSON data in this way. Flat incorporates a reusable Action for scraping and storing data (using Deno), a VS Code extension for setting up those workflows and a very nicely designed Flat Viewer web app for browsing CSV and JSON data hosted on GitHub. # 19th May 2021, 1:05 am

Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository

Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it.

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Tracking FARA by deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run

I’m using the combination of GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Run to retrieve data from the U.S. Department of Justice FARA website and deploy it as a queryable API using Datasette.

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