scrape-hacker-news-by-domain VS zettelkasten

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/...

I wrote a bash script to collect demographic information for everyone in the country using the us census. I also created a simple bash script to take notes following the method, you can check it out here: https://github.com/AndrewCopeland/zettelkasten

This seems very familiar to a bash application I created that follows the zettelkasten note taking method. The source can be found here https://github.com/AndrewCopeland/zettelkasten

Each note is saved as a markdown file in GitHub and can be searched and linked easily from the zk cli.

I touch a lot of different technologies and I use my zettelkasten almost every day. To either jot down quick notes and for quickly searching my notes for a specific command/configuration. I implemented my own zettelkasten software using bash. Its a simple CLI solution that sync's my notes up to github (public or private) so they are backed up and easy to retrieve from other devices. My zettelkasten is driven by the CLI but I use it to open notes via github or open the note within Visual Studio code. The application can be found here: https://github.com/AndrewCopeland/zettelkasten

A simple not taking application that is written 100% in bash. It follows the zettelkasten note taking method which implements small notes that can be linked together. All notes are written in markdown files and can be auto-synced to a public or private github. You can find the project here: https://github.com/AndrewCopeland/zettelkasten

I only water these projects when I need to and I have no intent on commercializing them. I water them because I like them not because I want to monetize them.