Contents tagged with Screen Scraper
No More Walls: The Screen Scrapers' Manifesto
If you think about it, Web 1.0 was all about walls.
Everybody had a site and rarely did sites share data or content. That really wasn’t the intent. All you in terms of tooling was hyperlinks.
Enabling technologies like RSS and AJAX gave rise to the Web 2.0 era and the dynamic changed. …
Update to Texts From Last Night WP7 App on the Way
Yesterday, my Texts From Last Night app for Windows Phone stopped working when the folks at Texts From Last Night changed their HTML.
I quickly found the problem and submitted a fix.
If they were trying to deter me, it failed.
More than likely, it was a design change. They added a new way to …
Introducing the Screen Scraping Utility Kit
Yesterday, I posted the Screen Scraping Utility Toolkit to MSDN. Here’s why you’ll want to take a look at it: You deal with unstructured data. You have legacy data stored in HTML and want to normalize it or put it into objects You want to create an app for a web site and you (or they) don’t have …
Extension Methods in JavaScript
One of the nicest features of C# 3.0 and beyond is extension methods. As I port my Screen Scraping Utility Kit to JavaScript, which makes extensive use of the language feature to attach the FindElement and FindElements to string. Creating extension methods is fairly trivial as you can see below. …
Adventures in Windows 8: Handling HTTP 302 Responses in WinRT
I’m currently working on porting an app of mine from the phone to Windows 8 Metro.
Since I have a lot more real estate to play with on Windows 8 than on the phone and do so love a good technical challenge, I decide to add more features to the Win8 version.
Many of these features are …
Fiddler Tip: Composer View
The HTTP(S) traffic sniffing tool Fiddler is a must have for any developer and doubly so for screen scrapers. Here’s one feature that I hadn’t noticed until last week: the Composer tool To access the composer tool, click on the Composer tab on the right side of Fiddler’s main screen. After you …
Two Useful Toolkit Projects in the Works
Based on the positive reception of the Screen Scraper Utility Kit for Windows Phone, I’ve decided to port it over to WinRT.
The Windows Runtime version add the ability to read in Definition files written in JSON.
But Wait! There’s More!
At recent Windows 8 Hack-a-thons and …
Screen Scraper Utility Kit for WinRT
Based on the success of the Screen Scraper Utility Kit for WP7, I decided to port the library over to Windows RT. It’s now available on MSDN Code Samples for download. Technically, speaking this Utility Kit is an example of “Web Scraping, ” but the FindElement and FindElements extension …
Is that Lucky
The Screen Scraper Utility Kit for WinRT has been downloaded 777 times. After surviving 12/21/2012, clearly this is another run of good luck.