I’ve blogged for a few years now, and I’ve used several tools along the way. zachbeauvais.com began as a Drupal site, until I worked out that it’s a bit overkill, and switched to WordPress. Recently, I’ve been toying with the idea of using a static site generator (a lá Jekyll or Hyde), or even pulling […]
Scraping the Royal Society membership list
To a data scientist any data is fair game, from my interest in the history of science I came across the membership records of the Royal Society from 1660 to 2007 which are available as a single PDF file. I’ve scraped the membership list before: the first time around I wrote a C# application which […]
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 […]
Protect your scrapers!
You know how it is. You wrote your scraper on a whim. Because it’s a wiki, some other people found it, and helped fix bugs in it and extend it. Time passes. And now your whole business depends on it. For when that happens, we’ve just pushed an update that lets you protect scrapers. This […]
Cardiff Hacks and Hackers Hacks Day
What’s occurin’? Loads in fact, at our first Welsh Hacks and Hackers Hack Day! From schools from space to catering colleges with a Food Safety Standard of 2, we had an amazing day. Check out the video by Gavin Owen: We got five teams: Co-Ordnance – This project aimed to be a local business tracker. […]
Be alert! Your scrapers need alerts
It’s important to know when your scrapers have stopped working, so you can fix them. And if someone else makes a change to one of your scrapers, you need to know, so you can check it’s OK and thank them. Over the next day or two, if you have made or contributed to a scraper […]