Why the Web Hasn't Birthed a Prettier Craigslist. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave! If I told you these Eagles lyrics described a certain website, you'd probably think it was Facebook. After all, public exclamations of quitting Facebook are so common it's cliche, but by and large the people still stay. The same is true on other networks that angered users with product or business changes. But even when a better alternative arrives — such as Path to Facebook or App.net to Twitter, we still don't see the users walk away. The two times a major exodus did come to fruition — Myspace to Facebook and Digg to Reddit — it was largely based on weaknesses in ease of use rather than philosophy. The weaknesses in Craigslist are painfully obvious: The site is ugly, any listing you post almost guarantees spam to your inbox, the apartment listings are full of scams, the site was once a known destination for sex trafficking (albeit minimized now) and lastly, people have died from engaging in a Craigslist transaction.
Solutions. Mechanize. Stateful programmatic web browsing in Python, after Andy Lester’s Perl module WWW::Mechanize. The examples below are written for a website that does not exist (example.com), so cannot be run. There are also some working examples that you can run. import reimport mechanize br = mechanize.Browser()br.open(" follow second link with element text matching regular expressionresponse1 = br.follow_link(text_regex=r"cheese\s*shop", nr=1)assert br.viewing_html()print br.title()print response1.geturl()print response1.info() # headersprint response1.read() # body br.select_form(name="order")# Browser passes through unknown attributes (including methods)# to the selected HTMLForm.br["cheeses"] = ["mozzarella", "caerphilly"] # (the method here is __setitem__)# Submit current form.
Browser calls .close() on the current response on# navigation, so this closes response1response2 = br.submit() mechanize exports the complete interface of urllib2: Beautiful Soup: We called him Tortoise because he taught us. [ Download | Documentation | Hall of Fame | For enterprise | Source | Changelog | Discussion group | Zine ] You didn't write that awful page. You're just trying to get some data out of it. Beautiful Soup is here to help. Since 2004, it's been saving programmers hours or days of work on quick-turnaround screen scraping projects.
Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful: Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. Beautiful Soup parses anything you give it, and does the tree traversal stuff for you. Valuable data that was once locked up in poorly-designed websites is now within your reach. Interested? Getting and giving support If you have questions, send them to the discussion group. Download Beautiful Soup The current release is Beautiful Soup 4.9.1 (May 17, 2020).
A Pinterest spammer tells all. See update below Last week, the Daily Dot taught you how to spot a Pinterest spammer. Now that same spammer has spotted us. After he read our article about his process of spamming Pinterest through thousands of bot accounts, Steve, who declined to give his last name, contacted us with an offer to clarify some of his methods. He proved his identity by providing a screenshot of his Amazon Affiliate account—the same final-fantas07 that we discussed in the aforementioned article. We were shocked by some of the facts Steve shared. As such, the Daily Dot decided to publish the entire interview. Could you tell us your name, age and occupation? How do you describe what it is you do? Have you found it easier to spam Pinterest than other networks?
DD: When did you first discover you could make money off of Pinterest? How much money do you make off Pinterest? As the days came my earnings increased and increased and increased. I guess you could say it’s like that. Cheapest CAPTCHA bypass service — Death by Captcha.