Scraping to save the web 🚜🌏

(Image: Data Refuge Stories) Whether it's saving data from politics or price hunting that you're after, transforming websites into data can be meaningful, rewarding and even fun. But check those Terms of Use. Some organizations consider scraping to be a form of trespassing, and there may be both copyright and ethical issues in collecting data off the Web. As long as the information is already public, and you are using it privately, there is probably no legal issue - but, you may still be thwarted by technical means of protection. Overcoming these restrictions could well be considered a criminal act. If in doubt: ask a lawyer, reach out to the open data community.

Parsehub is a free tool for visually creating web scrapers that collect web data repeatedly. See also Morph.io, Scrapy, and Feedly. There are many ways to write a small script that fetches web content, including various apps and plugins for your web browser.