22 items tagged “shot-scraper”
shot-scraper is a command-line utility for taking screenshots of websites and scraping content from them using JavaScript.
2024
Tracking Fireworks Impact on Fourth of July AQI
(via)
Danny Page ran shot-scraper once per minute (using cron) against this Purple Air map of the Bay Area and turned the captured screenshots into an animation using ffmpeg. The result shows the impact of 4th of July fireworks on air quality between 7pm and 7am.
Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins
I wrote extensive annotated release notes for Datasette 1.0a8 and LLM 0.13 already. Here’s what else I’ve been up to this past three weeks.
[... 1,074 words]shot-scraper 1.4. I decided to add HTTP Basic authentication support to shot-scraper today and found several excellent pull requests waiting to be merged, by Niel Thiart and mhalle.
1.4 adds support for HTTP Basic auth, custom --scale-factor shots, additional --browser-arg arguments and a fix for --interactive mode.
2023
Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos
Three weeks of conferences and Datasette Cloud work, four days of chaos for OpenAI.
[... 766 words]Migrating out of PostHaven. Amjith Ramanujam decided to migrate his blog content from PostHaven to a Markdown static site. He used shot-scraper (shelled out to from a Python script) to scrape his existing content using a snippet of JavaScript, wrote the content to a SQLite database using sqlite-utils, then used markdownify (new to me, a neat Python package for converting HTML to Markdown via BeautifulSoup) to write the content to disk as Markdown.
datasette-scraper, Big Local News and other weeknotes
In addition to exploring the new MusicCaps training and evaluation data I’ve been working on the big Datasette JSON refactor, and getting excited about a Datasette project that I didn’t work on at all.
[... 1,744 words]Examples of sites built using Datasette (via) I gave the examples page on the Datasette website a significant upgrade today: it now includes screenshots (taken using shot-scraper) of six projects chosen to illustrate the variety of problems Datasette can be used to tackle.
2022
Leveraging ’shot-scraper’ and creating image diffs. Üllar Seerme has a neat recipe for using shot-scraper and ImageMagick to create differential animations showing how a scraped web page has visually changed.
Weeknotes: DjangoCon, SQLite in Django, datasette-gunicorn
I spent most of this week at DjangoCon in San Diego—my first outside-of-the-Bay-Area conference since the before-times.
[... 1,184 words]Dumping the HTML of a page using shot-scraper. New in 1.0 is the “shot-scraper html URL” command, which outputs the HTML of a page once JavaScript has finished executing there. You can pass in additional custom JavaScript to run before the shapshot is taken, and you can also specify a CSS selector on the page to return just that fragment of HTML.
shot-scraper 1.0 (via) Only a minor release in terms of features, but I decided that I’m comfortable enough with the CLI design at this point that I’m ready to stamp a 1.0 on it and commit to not making backwards-incompatible changes (at least without shipping a 2.0 release, which I’d like to avoid if possible).
Automating screenshots for the Datasette documentation using shot-scraper
I released shot-scraper back in March as a tool for keeping screenshots in documentation up-to-date.
[... 1,810 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more
Despite distractions from AI I managed to make progress on a bunch of different projects this week, including new releases of s3-credentials and shot-scraper, a new datasette-edit-templates plugin and a small but neat improvement to Datasette Lite.
[... 1,562 words]A tiny web app to create images from OpenStreetMap maps
Earlier today I found myself wanting to programmatically generate some images of maps.
[... 1,388 words]simonw/datasette-screenshots (via) I started a new GitHub repository to automate taking screenshots of Datasette for marketing purposes, using my shot-scraper browser automation tool.
Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards
This week I helped Natalie launch the Pillar Point Stewards website and built a new tool for loading PyPI package data into SQLite, in order to help promote the excellent datasette-dashboards plugin by Romain Clement.
[... 1,985 words]Weeknotes: Tildes not dashes, and the big refactor
After last week’s shot-scraper distractions with Playwright, this week I finally managed to make some concrete progress on the path towards Datasette 1.0.
[... 1,292 words]Instantly create a GitHub repository to take screenshots of a web page
I just released shot-scraper-template, a GitHub repository template that helps you start taking automated screenshots of a web page by filling out a form.
[... 1,177 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.
[... 1,276 words]@newshomepages (via) Ben Welsh used my shot-scraper tool and GitHub Actions to launch a Twitter bot which tweets screenshots of newspaper homepages on a scheduled basis. Ben says: “The tech is so easy, I was able to pull it off in a couple hours at zero cost. A decade ago I ran a similar project using the cloud resources of the day. [...] It costs thousands of dollars and the screenshots were of much lower quality. Incredible progress!”
Weeknotes: Distracted by Playwright
My goal for this week was to unblock progress on Datasette by finally finishing the dash encoding implementation I described last week. I was getting close, and then I got very distracted by Playwright.
[... 892 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.
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