As a UX designer and part-time anthropologist, working at ScraperWiki is an awesome opportunity to meet the whole gamut of hackers, programmers and data geeks. Inside of ScraperWiki itself, I’m surrounded by guys who started programming almost before they could walk. But right at the other end, there are sales and support staff who only […]
Book review: JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
This week I’ve been programming in JavaScript, something of a novelty for me. Jealous of the Dear Leader’s automatically summarize tool I wanted to make something myself, hopefully a future post will describe my timeline visualising tool. Further motivations are that web scraping requires some knowledge of JavaScript since it is a key browser technology […]
5 yr old goes ‘potty’ at Devon and Somerset Fire Service (Emergencies and Data Driven Stories)
It’s 9:54am in Torquay on a Wednesday morning: One appliance from Torquays fire station was mobilised to reports of a child with a potty seat stuck on its head. On arrival an undistressed two year old female was discovered with a toilet seat stuck on her head. Crews used vaseline and the finger kit to remove the […]
Job advert: Lead programmer
Oil wells, marathon results, planning applications… ScraperWiki is a Silicon Valley style startup, in the North West of England, in Liverpool. We’re changing the world of open data, and how data science is done together on the Internet. We’re looking for a programmer who’d like to: Revolutionise the tools for sharing data, and code that works with […]
Job advert: Product / UX lover
ScraperWiki is a Silicon Valley style startup, but based in the UK. We’re changing the world of open data, and how programming is done together on the Internet. We’re looking for a web product designer who is… Able to make design decisions to launch features by themselves. Capable of writing CSS and HTML, and some […]
Job advert: Web designer/programmer
Care about oil spills, newspapers or lost cats? ScraperWiki is a Silicon Valley style startup, but in the North West of England, in Liverpool. We’re changing the world of open data, and how programming is done together on the Internet. We’re looking for a web designer/programmer who is… Capable of writing standards compliant CSS and […]
Scraping PDFs: now 26% less unpleasant with ScraperWiki
Got a PDF you want to get data from? Try our easy web interface over at PDFTables.com! Scraping PDFs is a bit like cleaning drains with your teeth. It’s slow, unpleasant, and you can’t help but feel you’re using the wrong tools for the job. Coders try to avoid scraping PDFs if there’s any other option. But […]