Entries Tagged as 'United States'

Doin’ the Things a Spider Can!

Amazing Fantasy #16 (Dec. 1995). Painted cover by Paul Lee.Image via Wikipedia

This is a quick post just to say that I’m alive. While I was browsing the Library of Congress’ blog, I came across this awesome post: The Library of Congress acquired 24 pages of original 1962 drawings from “Amazing Fantasy #15.”

Amazing Fantasy #15 was the first appearance of Spider Man, and spawned one of the most prolific comic characters of all time. Although I’ve never really been a big fan of Spider Man, the thought of seeing these pages in person makes my fatty little fanboy heart dance with glee.

If the Library of Congress deemed these pages worthy of inclusion, perhaps that means comic books have finally become a ‘legitimate’ art form.

Website Scraping for Dummies

For the last week, my interest has been aimed at website scraping. Wikipedia defines website scraping as:

“a technique in which a computer program extracts data from the display output of another program. The program doing the scraping is called a screen scraper. The key element that distinguishes screen scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for final display to a human user, rather than as input to another program, and is therefore usually neither documented nor structured for convenient parsing.”

Website scraping has traditionally been the domain of the Black Hat internet marketer, although there are plenty of White Hat applications for website scraping as well. I’m interested in it to build a snail mail list for my wife to use in her new business.

I’ve found a lot of resources, but sadly, they seem to be geared towards programmers. I can edit PHP, and sometimes copy/paste cobble things together, but outside of that, I’ve never had much luck learning how to program, mainly due to time constraints and an inability to dedicate myself to one language.

Although I’ve found a ton of information on website scraping, I’m going to limit myself to a shortish list.

Website Scraping Platforms

Web Harvest is an Open Source, Java based platform geared towards website data extraction. As they put it, Web Harvest “offers a way to collect desired Web pages and extract useful data from them. In order to do that, it leverages well established techniques and technologies for text/xml manipulation such as XSLT, XQuery and Regular Expressions. Web Harvest mainly focuses on HTML/XML based web sites which still make vast majority of the Web content. ”

Web Harvest looks to be extremely powerful and flexible, and it’s free, which is always nice. If you’re able to write code in Java, you may want to look at it pretty closely.

The Twit88 blog has two excellent tutorials on using Java/Web Harvest to extract data from websites. Web Scraping using Web Harvest, and Java - Writing a Web Page Scraper or Web Data Extraction Tool.

Thanks to MIT’s SIMILIE Project, you can use two of their programs - Piggy Bank, and Solvent - to turn your copy of Mozilla FireFox into a data scraping platform. Both plugins are free under the BSD License, and come with sample scrapers to help you get started.

 

Data Scraping With PHP

Sunil Bhatia has an article on writing website scrapers in php. His tutorial goes through the basics, and is written with newbies in mind. An excellent stepping stone for aspiring programmers such as myself.

Yahoo! Pipes prove their power and flexibility once again as Day explains how to use the Fetch Page module to make a web scraper. This may be just the trick to make feeds off of Yahoo! Buzz or eBay Pulse.

Finally, I found a bunch of specialized website scrapers and programming libraries at Schrenk.com. The scripts are meant to be used in conjunction with the book “Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers” by Michael Schrenk, but I think they’d also be a good starting point for anyone with a little programming knowledge.

Starting From Scratch

Get Rich Slowly has a great interview with Adam Shepard, the author of “Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.” Adam started his experiment with only $25 and the clothes on his back. Living in a homeless shelter while looking for work his goal was to start with nothing and in less than a year save $2500, buy a car, and to live in a furnished apartment.

And he succeeded in spades. The interview is very motivational. It shows what a person can achieve with the proper mindset.

He even advises you not to buy his book, but to check it out from the library, or read it at Barnes and Noble. Now that’s refreshing.

A Boot in the Right Direction

(Cross Posted to Fascination Street )Following up on my previous post, I am starting down the path towards becoming an Internet Marketer. I have opened my AdWords account, and started my first campaign. I’m trying to remain cautiously optimistic. I’ve set a limit of $5/day, and I’m going to probably burn through $20 to $25 just testing the waters.

I don’t expect that I’m going to make a crapload of money. I’m not even expecting to make money at all. I don’t have a defeatist attitude, getting rich isn’t the point of this first campaign. The point is to start getting results. I’m eyeballing what seems to be an absolutely massive market that isn’t even remotely being tapped. The question is, how to tap into it.

Hence my first AdWords campaign. I’ve spent years now reading the latest and greatest e-books promising to teach me all of the “Insider’s Secrets” and such. The problem being is that actions are the most important thing when it comes to determining one’s future. I don’t pretend that I’m a guru, or even on the path to becoming one, but I know what my strengths are, and I intend to utilize them to the fullest.

My father is an engineer, my mother an artist. Opposites really do attract, eh? I’ve always had an innate ability to solve problems, generally thinking laterally. I am proud to say that my efforts to break the various systems that I have worked in have led to rules specifically designed to thwart my efforts. Of course, that just generally just encourages me to find new ways around my problems. I digg pissing people off. Moreso, I love to get inside of their heads and just drive them to the brink of madness. I am a psychological sadist who has the ability to observe in a detatched manner the subject I’m working on. I have the brain of a lawyer, but the heart of a used car salesman.

For all of my life I’ve had to deal with the war raging inside of me: logic versus passion. I’m very analytical in my outlook, but I tend to flip to passionate in a heartbeat. My bullshit tolerance is low as a result, and getting lower the older I get. I have a wife, a kid, and a mortgage, so I have to deal with shit, since I can’t just up and quit when I get pissed off, as I was once wont to do.

I stand out at work. I hate working. Detest it. But, the way I see it, if I’m going to be there I’m going to do as much as possible to fill the time. Once I figure out my job, I usually start coasting at about 125% of productivity. That doesn’t make me popular. The fact that I can do it using half the energy of the guy next to me who is struggling at around 80% productivity doesn’t make me many friends either. Add in that I’m a non union worker in a union shop, and it’s amazing I don’t have more “accidents.” The thing is, I’m tired of having to put forth 125% effort just to keep my mind occupied, all the while lining somebody else’s pockets. I want to fill my own pockets with my effort.

That’s why I’m embarking on this venture, so I don’t have to deal with anybody’s crap anymore.

I’ve recently become a reader of Cash Tactics. The author of the blog is “Ruck,” and two years ago he was in my place - wife, two jobs, and trying to get out. Two years later, he’s hit the big time. That’s my inspiration. The ‘only in America‘ type of success story that Ruck is enjoying. I admire his honesty. He shoots from the hip, straight from the hip. When he recommends things, he doesn’t even use affiliate links, unless he’s cloaking them some way I can’t figure out.

Recently he wrote a post entitled Stop Looking For Handouts And Start Busting Tail. Articles like this really help to keep my motivation high, and this is the second post in the space of about three days that really spoke to me. I don’t believe in coincidences, but I do believe in synchronicity - the points where everything in the universe seems to actually fit.

I notice synchronicities all the time, but by the time I squash the Woody Allen voice inside of me, the window has closed, and I’m left waiting for the next opportunity. There’s a saying in certain political circles that “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Political views aside, that sums my life up in a nutshell.

Last Tuesday/Wednesday was one of those times, however instead of debating, I kicked my inner nebbish in the face, and decided to act on an idea that came to me out of the blue. On an impulse I registered BookMarkMoney.com, and actually paid for hosting instead of slaving it to my main hosting account. Then I went to work.

And that’s where I am today. I’m still working, behind the scenes. I’m splitting my time between backend stuff on this site, AdWords, some speculation on eBay, redesigning my brother’s website, snowblowing the damned driveway every two to three days, and my wife and kid. Plus I have an amazing idea in the pipeline, and if I can wrangle it, I’m going to install the software and play around with it this weekend.

It sounds like a lot of work. And it is. But it’s 125%, and that’s nothing new. The fact that I’m doing it for myself, now that’s new.