Dirt Simple Datamining
summary
Logs into Bebo by POSTing to sign_in JSP, handles the extra hidden parameter (signInBack), and uses mechanize to persist cookies and follow forms; discovers AJAX steps with Tamper Data and bypasses JS by posting the right fields. Crawler extracts member IDs, downloads profile and friends pages, and parses them with a mix of nokogiri and regex parsing, writing pages to disk for debugging. Code lives on GitHub; throttling, proxies, robots.txt and legal limits determine how far the crawler runs.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Intro
- 4:10Simple Example
- 6:37Source
- 8:13Websites
- 9:16Tamper
- 10:52Profile Page
- 12:03Get Member ID
- 13:31Class Overview
- 15:35Profile Pages
- 18:38Parser
- 20:11Profile
- 21:34Parse
- 22:15Code
- 23:50Caveats
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