27 items tagged “gitscraping”
2024
Figure out who’s leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat (via) Rachel Kroll describes a neat hack for companies with an internal LDAP server or similar machine-readable employee directory: run a cron somewhere internal that grabs the latest version and diffs it against the previous to figure out who has joined or left the company.
I suggest using Git for this—a form of Git scraping—as then you get a detailed commit log of changes over time effectively for free.
I really enjoyed Rachel’s closing thought: “Incidentally, if someone gets mad about you running this sort of thing, you probably don’t want to work there anyway. On the other hand, if you’re able to build such tools without IT or similar getting ”threatened“ by it, then you might be somewhere that actually enjoys creating interesting and useful stuff. Treasure such places. They don’t tend to last.” # 9th February 2024, 5:44 am
2022
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.
[... 1534 words]Measuring traffic during the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival
This weekend was the 50th annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival.
[... 2693 words]Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival traffic on Saturday 15th October 2022 (via) It’s the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival this weekend... and its impact on the traffic between our little town of El Granada and Half Moon Bay—8 minutes drive away—is notorious. So I built a git scraper that archives estimated driving times from the Google Maps Navigation API, and used git-history to turn that scraped data into a SQLite database and visualize it on a chart. # 16th October 2022, 3:56 am
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.
[... 1211 words]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.
[... 1276 words]shot-scraper: automated screenshots for documentation, built on Playwright
shot-scraper is a new tool that I’ve built to help automate the process of keeping screenshots up-to-date in my documentation. It also doubles as a scraping tool—hence the name—which I picked as a complement to my git scraping and help scraping techniques.
[... 1802 words]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.
2021
Weeknotes: Shaving some beautiful yaks
I’ve been mostly shaving yaks this week—two in particular: the Datasette table refactor and the next release of git-history. I also built and released my first Web Component!
[... 1307 words]Weeknotes: Apache proxies in Docker containers, refactoring Datasette
Updates to six major projects this week, plus finally some concrete progress towards Datasette 1.0.
[... 1630 words]Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop
My main project this week was a 90 minute workshop I delivered about Git scraping at Coda.Br 2021, a Brazilian data journalism conference, on Friday. This inspired the creation of a brand new tool, git-history, plus smaller improvements to a range of other projects.
[... 1239 words]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.
[... 514 words]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
Weeknotes: SpatiaLite 5, Datasette on Azure, more CDC vaccination history
This week I got SpatiaLite 5 working in the Datasette Docker image, improved the CDC vaccination history git scraper, figured out Datasette on Azure and we closed on a new home!
[... 986 words]Weeknotes: Datasette and Git scraping at NICAR, VaccinateCA
This week I virtually attended the NICAR data journalism conference and made a ton of progress on the Django backend for VaccinateCA (see last week).
[... 773 words]Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk
I prepared a lightning talk about Git scraping for the NICAR 2021 data journalism conference. In the talk I explain the idea of running scheduled scrapers in GitHub Actions, show some examples and then live code a new scraper for the CDC’s vaccination data using the GitHub web interface. Here’s the video.
[... 289 words]2020
Weeknotes: sqlite-utils 3.0 alpha, Git scraping in the zeitgeist
Natalie and I decided to escape San Francisco for election week, and have been holed up in Fort Bragg on the Northern California coast. I’ve mostly been on vacation, but I did find time to make some significant changes to sqlite-utils. Plus notes on an exciting Git scraping project.
[... 603 words]nyt-2020-election-scraper. Brilliant application of git scraping by Alex Gaynor and a growing team of contributors. Takes a JSON snapshot of the NYT’s latest election poll figures every five minutes, then runs a Python script to iterate through the history and build an HTML page showing the trends, including what percentage of the remaining votes each candidate needs to win each state. This is the perfect case study in why it can be useful to take a “snapshot if the world right now” data source and turn it into a git revision history over time. # 6th November 2020, 2:24 pm
Datasette Weekly: Datasette 0.50, git scraping, extracting columns (via) The first edition of the new Datasette Weekly newsletter—covering Datasette 0.50, Git scraping, extracting columns with sqlite-utils and featuring datasette-graphql as the first “plugin of the week” # 10th October 2020, 9 pm
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.
[... 963 words]Weeknotes: datasette-auth-passwords, a Datasette logo and a whole lot more
All sorts of project updates this week.
[... 913 words]Weeknotes: Archiving coronavirus.data.gov.uk, custom pages and directory configuration in Datasette, photos-to-sqlite
I mainly made progress on three projects this week: Datasette, photos-to-sqlite and a cleaner way of archiving data to a git repository.
[... 1132 words]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.
[... 1599 words]2019
Tracking PG&E outages by scraping to a git repo
PG&E have cut off power to several million people in northern California, supposedly as a precaution against wildfires.
[... 833 words]Generating a commit log for San Francisco’s official list of trees
San Francisco has a neat open data portal (as do an increasingly large number of cities these days). For a few years my favourite file on there has been Street Tree List, a list of all 190,000 trees in the city maintained by the Department of Public Works.
[... 1051 words]2017
Changelogs to help understand the fires in the North Bay
The situation in the counties north of San Francisco is horrifying right now. I’ve repurposed some of the tools I built to for the Irma Response project last month to collect and track some data that might be of use to anyone trying to understand what’s happening up there. I’m sharing these now in the hope that they might prove useful.
[... 383 words]Scraping hurricane Irma
The Irma Response project is a team of volunteers working together to make information available during and after the storm. There is a huge amount of information out there, on many different websites. The Irma API is an attempt to gather key information in one place, verify it and publish it in a reuseable way. It currently powers the irmashelters.org website.
[... 438 words]