Rondayview

Spidering Hacks

My most recent minor claim to fame---two of the one-hundred hacks in the book are by yours truly. I received my complimentary copy on Friday. The focus of the book is on scripts which spider or scrape existing web resources in order to repurpose the data. My first hack is a simple script which will publish your IE favorites to your web site (here's an example that uses the default template). The second shows how to hack latitude and longitude data out of Mappoint and then use those results to determine the geographic distance between two places.

If you're interested in ways to grab and repurpose data from the web, there's a ton of practical stuff in here, and as with all of the O'Reilly "hacks" line of books, code for everything is provided. Happy hacking!