What i’m coding
A couple of new code related developments this week. First off, now that we have the open net, walled gardens are discouraged and APIs/syndication is everywhere, it’s been a long time since I had to scrape anything. What’s more I always thought of scraping sites as a one off hack, I never considered that it could be a viable business model. But recently I had to write a tool that would programatically pull content from Kodak Gallery, a popular photo sharing site with no API whatsoever. To get the job done I used mechanize, which in turn uses hpricot and finally I used firebug for debugging. The whole process was surprisingly pleasant consider i’m picking apart html bits. I’ve always been cautious about relying on scraping but I suppose if you do it to a popular site they’re in turn cautious about changing their code.
In other exciting news, a few months ago I put my name on the SimpleDB beta list and I got an invitation on Friday. There have been a lot of great projects for ruby/rails in the space and even a toolkit from the New York Times. I’m really eager to integrate SimpleDB and figure out if it’s mature enough to roll into production.
