masscan_as_a_service VS scrape-hacker-news-by-domain

I use this approach for monitoring open ports in our infrastructure -- running masscan, commiting results to git repo. If there are changes, open the merge request for review. During the review, one would investigate the actual server, why there was change in open ports.

https://github.com/bobek/masscan_as_a_service

We typically use a variant of https://github.com/bobek/masscan_as_a_service

Massacan is awesome. One of the usecases is to periodically scan your own servers to see if you have not accidentally opened some new ports in firewalls.

https://github.com/bobek/masscan_as_a_service

Yeah I have a bunch of these using pretty-printed JSON - here's one that scrapes Hacker News for mentions of my site, for example: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/...

Git is a key technology in this approach, because the value you get out of this form of scraping is the commit history - it's a way of turning a static source of information into a record of how that information changed over time.

I think it's fine to use the term "scraping" to refer to downloading a JSON file.

These days an increasing number of websites work by serving up JSON which is then turned into HTML by a client-side JavaScript app. The JSON often isn't a formally documented API, but you can grab it directly to avoid the extra step of processing the HTML.

I do run Git scrapers that process HTML as well. A couple of examples:

scrape-san-mateo-fire-dispatch https://github.com/simonw/scrape-san-mateo-fire-dispatch scrapes the HTML from http://www.firedispatch.com/iPhoneActiveIncident.asp?Agency=... and records both the original HTML and converted JSON in the repository.

scrape-hacker-news-by-domain https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain uses my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ browser automation tool to convert an HTML page on Hacker News into JSON and save that to the repo. I wrote more about how that works here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Dec/2/datasette-write-api/

I have a neat Hacker News scraping setup that I'm really pleased with.

The problem: I want to know when content from one of my sites is submitted to Hacker News, and keep track of the points and comments over time. I also want to be alerted when it happens.

Solution: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/

This repo does a LOT of things.

It's an implementation of my Git scraping pattern - https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/ - in that it runs a script once an hour to check for more content.

It scrapes https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net (scraping the HTML because this particular feature isn't supported by the Hacker News API) using shot-scraper - a tool I built for command-line browser automation: https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/

The scraper works by running this JavaScript against the page and recording the resulting JSON to the Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/...

That solves the "monitor and record any changes" bit.

But... I want alerts when my content shows up.

I solve that using three more tools I built: https://datasette.io/ and https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-atom and https://datasette.cloud/

This script here runs to push the latest scraped JSON to my SQLite database hosted using my in-development SaaS platform, Datasette Cloud: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/...

I defined this SQL view https://simon.datasette.cloud/data/hacker_news_posts_atom which shows the latest data in the format required by the datasette-atom plugin.

Which means I can subscribe to the resulting Atom feed (add .atom to that URL) in NetNewsWire and get alerted when my content shows up on Hacker News!

I wrote a bit more about how this all works here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Dec/2/datasette-write-api/

I'm really pleased with the Hacker News scraping demo in this - it's an extension of the scraper I wrote back in March, using shot-scraper to execute JavaScript in headless Chrome and write the resulting JSON back to a Git repo: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Mar/14/scraping-web-pages-sho...

My new demo also then pipes that data up to Datasette using curl -X POST - this script here: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/...