scrape-san-mateo-fire-dispatch VS Geo-IP-Database

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 couple of similar scrapers as well. One is a private repo that I collect visa information off Wikipedia (for Visalogy.com), and GeoIP information from MaxMind database (used with their permission).

https://github.com/Ayesh/Geo-IP-Database/

It downloads the repo, and dumps the data split by the first 8 bytes of the IP address, and saves to individual JSON files. For every new scraper run, it creates a new tag and pushes it as a package, so the dependents can simply update them with their dependency manager.