Dear Donna: Tread Lightly When Suggesting 'Man-Scaping'

Dear Donna,

A man I recently began dating needs some "man-scaping." I would find him much more appealing if he trimmed the hair in his ears and nose and on the back of his neck. He has hinted that he is buying me something for Valentine's Day. Do you think it would be appropriate to buy him a gift certificate to a spa and tell him he could benefit from some "man-scaping?" - Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Since Valentine's Day is about love and romance, I would not put the focus on "man-scaping" by buying him a gift certificate to a spa. There is no easy, tactful way to suggest to someone that they do something about ear and nose hair. One day when you are sitting close to him, whisper in his ear, "I think you could use some "man-scaping." After you explain what "man-scaping" is, be ready with the card to the spa.

Dear Donna,

I am in my 40s, single and dating for the past five years. I meet men mostly through friends, work and online. The last two men I met assumed we would split the bill after lunch or dinner. The first one caught me off guard so I paid. I also immediately decided I would not see him again. The second added up my half of the bill and asked me what kind of tip I thought was appropriate. I told him I thought he should pay, and the date went downhill from there. Whatever happened to the gentleman pays? - Sarah

Dear Sarah,

This is a side effect of online dating. When you are meeting multiple women, it can be expensive to always be the one paying. If you are meeting someone for the first time, keep it simple. Agree to meet for one hour and not over lunch or dinner. Most men do not expect a lady to split the cost of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. Bottom line, if he is interested in you, he gladly will pay.

Source:http://gazette.com/dear-donna-tread-lightly-when-suggesting-man-scaping/article/1545611

I Don’t Need No Stinking API: Web Scraping For Fun and Profit

If you’ve ever needed to pull data from a third party website, chances are you started by checking to see if they had an official API. But did you know that there’s a source of structured data that virtually every website on the internet supports automatically, by default?
scraper toolThat’s right, we’re talking about pulling our data straight out of HTML — otherwise known as web scraping. Here’s why web scraping is awesome:

Any content that can be viewed on a webpage can be scraped. Period.

If a website provides a way for a visitor’s browser to download content and render that content in a structured way, then almost by definition, that content can be accessed programmatically. In this article, I’ll show you how.

Over the past few years, I’ve scraped dozens of websites — from music blogs and fashion retailers to the USPTO and undocumented JSON endpoints I found by inspecting network traffic in my browser.

There are some tricks that site owners will use to thwart this type of access — which we’ll dive into later — but they almost all have simple work-arounds.

Why You Should Scrape

But first we’ll start with some great reasons why you should consider web scraping first, before you start looking for APIs or RSS feeds or other, more traditional forms of structured data.

Websites are More Important Than APIs

The biggest one is that site owners generally care way more about maintaining their public-facing visitor website than they do about their structured data feeds.

We’ve seen it very publicly with Twitter clamping down on their developer ecosystem, and I’ve seen it multiple times in my projects where APIs change or feeds move without warning.

Sometimes it’s deliberate, but most of the time these sorts of problems happen because no one at the organization really cares or maintains the structured data. If it goes offline or gets horribly mangled, no one really notices.

Whereas if the website goes down or is having issues, that’s a more of an in-your-face, drop-everything-until-this-is-fixed kind of problem, and gets dealt with quickly.

No Rate-Limiting

Another thing to think about is that the concept of rate-limiting is virtually non-existent for public websites.

Aside from the occasional captchas on sign up pages, most businesses generally don’t build a lot of defenses against automated access. I’ve scraped a single site for over 4 hours at a time and not seen any issues.

Unless you’re making concurrent requests, you probably won’t be viewed as a DDOS attack, you’ll just show up as a super-avid visitor in the logs, in case anyone’s looking.

Anonymous Access

There are also fewer ways for the website’s administrators to track your behavior, which can be useful if you want gather data more privately.

With APIs, you often have to register to get a key and then send along that key with every request. But with simple HTTP requests, you’re basically anonymous besides your IP address and cookies, which can be easily spoofed.

The Data’s Already in Your Face

Web scraping is also universally available, as I mentioned earlier. You don’t have to wait for a site to open up an API or even contact anyone at the organization. Just spend some time browsing the site until you find the data you need and figure out some basic access patterns — which we’ll talk about next.

Let’s Get to Scraping

So you’ve decided you want to dive in and start grabbing data like a true hacker. Awesome.

Just like reading API docs, it takes a bit of work up front to figure out how the data is structured and how you can access it. Unlike APIs however, there’s really no documentation so you have to be a little clever about it.

I’ll share some of the tips I’ve learned along the way.

Fetching the Data

So the first thing you’re going to need to do is fetch the data. You’ll need to start by finding your “endpoints” — the URL or URLs that return the data you need.

If you know you need your information organized in a certain way — or only need a specific subset of it — you can browse through the site using their navigation. Pay attention to the URLs and how they change as you click between sections and drill down into sub-sections.

The other option for getting started is to go straight to the site’s search functionality. Try typing in a few different terms and again, pay attention to the URL and how it changes depending on what you search for. You’ll probably see a GET parameter like q= that always changes based on you search term.

Try removing other unnecessary GET parameters from the URL, until you’re left with only the ones you need to load your data. Make sure that there’s always a beginning ? to start the query string and a & between each key/value pair.

Dealing with Pagination

At this point, you should be starting to see the data you want access to, but there’s usually some sort of pagination issue keeping you from seeing all of it at once. Most regular APIs do this as well, to keep single requests from slamming the database.

Usually, clicking to page 2 adds some sort of offset= parameter to the URL, which is usually either the page number or else the number of items displayed on the page. Try changing this to some really high number and see what response you get when you “fall off the end” of the data.

With this information, you can now iterate over every page of results, incrementing the offset parameter as necessary, until you hit that “end of data” condition.

The other thing you can try doing is changing the “Display X Per Page” which most pagination UIs now have. Again, look for a new GET parameter to be appended to the URL which indicates how many items are on the page.

Try setting this to some arbitrarily large number to see if the server will return all the information you need in a single request. Sometimes there’ll be some limits enforced server-side that you can’t get around by tampering with this, but it’s still worth a shot since it can cut down on the number of pages you must paginate through to get all the data you need.

AJAX Isn’t That Bad!

Sometimes people see web pages with URL fragments # and AJAX content loading and think a site can’t be scraped. On the contrary! If a site is using AJAX to load the data, that probably makes it even easier to pull the information you need.

The AJAX response is probably coming back in some nicely-structured way (probably JSON!) in order to be rendered on the page with Javscript.

All you have to do is pull up the network tab in Web Inspector or Firebug and look through the XHR requests for the ones that seem to be pulling in your data.

Once you find it, you can leave the crufty HTML behind and focus instead on this endpoint, which is essentially an undocumented API.

(Un)structured Data?

Now that you’ve figured out how to get the data you need from the server, the somewhat tricky part is getting the data you need out of the page’s markup.

Use CSS Hooks

In my experience, this is usually straightforward since most web designers litter the markup with tons of classes and ids to provide hooks for their CSS.

You can piggyback on these to jump to the parts of the markup that contain the data you need.

Just right click on a section of information you need and pull up the Web Inspector or Firebug to look at it. Zoom up and down through the DOM tree until you find the outermost <div> around the item you want.

This <div> should be the outer wrapper around a single item you want access to. It probably has some class attribute which you can use to easily pull out all of the other wrapper elements on the page. You can then iterate over these just as you would iterate over the items returned by an API response.

A note here though: the DOM tree that is presented by the inspector isn’t always the same as the DOM tree represented by the HTML sent back by the website. It’s possible that the DOM you see in the inspector has been modified by Javascript — or sometime even the browser, if it’s in quirks mode.

Once you find the right node in the DOM tree, you should always view the source of the page (“right click” > “View Source”) to make sure the elements you need are actually showing up in the raw HTML.

This issue has caused me a number of head-scratchers.

Get a Good HTML Parsing Library

It is probably a horrible idea to try parsing the HTML of the page as a long string (although there are times I’ve needed to fall back on that). Spend some time doing research for a good HTML parsing library in your language of choice.

Most of the code I write is in Python, and I love BeautifulSoup for its error handling and super-simple API. I also love its motto:

    You didn’t write that awful page. You’re just trying to get some data out of it. Beautiful Soup is here to help. :)

You’re going to have a bad time if you try to use an XML parser since most websites out there don’t actually validate as properly formed XML (sorry XHTML!) and will give you a ton of errors.

A good library will read in the HTML that you pull in using some HTTP library (hat tip to the Requests library if you’re writing Python) and turn it into an object that you can traverse and iterate over to your heart’s content, similar to a JSON object.

Some Traps To Know About

I should mention that some websites explicitly prohibit the use of automated scraping, so it’s a good idea to read your target site’s Terms of Use to see if you’re going to make anyone upset by scraping.

For two-thirds of the website I’ve scraped, the above steps are all you need. Just fire off a request to your “endpoint” and parse the returned data.

But sometimes, you’ll find that the response you get when scraping isn’t what you saw when you visited the site yourself.

When In Doubt, Spoof Headers

Some websites require that your User Agent string is set to something they allow, or you need to set certain cookies or other headers in order to get a proper response.

Depending on the HTTP library you’re using to make requests, this is usually pretty straightforward. I just browse the site in my web browser and then grab all of the headers that my browser is automatically sending. Then I put those in a dictionary and send them along with my request.

Note that this might mean grabbing some login or other session cookie, which might identify you and make your scraping less anonymous. It’s up to you how serious of a risk that is.

Content Behind A Login

Sometimes you might need to create an account and login to access the information you need. If you have a good HTTP library that handles logins and automatically sending session cookies (did I mention how awesome Requests is?), then you just need your scraper login before it gets to work.

Note that this obviously makes you totally non-anonymous to the third party website so all of your scraping behavior is probably pretty easy to trace back to you if anyone on their side cared to look.

Rate Limiting

I’ve never actually run into this issue myself, although I did have to plan for it one time. I was using a web service that had a strict rate limit that I knew I’d exceed fairly quickly.

Since the third party service conducted rate-limiting based on IP address (stated in their docs), my solution was to put the code that hit their service into some client-side Javascript, and then send the results back to my server from each of the clients.

This way, the requests would appear to come from thousands of different places, since each client would presumably have their own unique IP address, and none of them would individually be going over the rate limit.

Depending on your application, this could work for you.

Poorly Formed Markup

Sadly, this is the one condition that there really is no cure for. If the markup doesn’t come close to validating, then the site is not only keeping you out, but also serving a degraded browsing experience to all of their visitors.

It’s worth digging into your HTML parsing library to see if there’s any setting for error tolerance. Sometimes this can help.

If not, you can always try falling back on treating the entire HTML document as a long string and do all of your parsing as string splitting or — God forbid — a giant regex.

—

Well there’s 2000 words to get you started on web scraping. Hopefully I’ve convinced you that it’s actually a legitimate way of collecting data.

It’s a real hacker challenge to read through some HTML soup and look for patterns and structure in the markup in order to pull out the data you need. It usually doesn’t take much longer than reading some API docs and getting up to speed with a client. Plus it’s way more fun!

Source: https://blog.hartleybrody.com/web-scraping/

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

If you are interested to know something more on Web Data Mining and other details, you are welcome to the Screen Scraping Technology site.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

What is Blog Content Scraping?

Blog content scraping is an act usually performed with scripts that extract content from numerous sources and pulls it into one site. It is so easy now that anyone can install a WordPress site, put a free or commercial theme, and install a few plugins that will go and scrape content from selected blogs, so it can be published on their site.

Why are they Stealing my Content?

Some of our users have asked us why are they stealing my content? The simple answer is because you are AWESOME. The truth is that these content scrapers have ulterior motives. Below are just few reasons why someone would scrape your content:

•    Affiliate commission – There are some dirty affiliate marketers out there that just wants to exploit the system to make few extra bucks. They will use your content and other’s content to bring traffic to their site through search engine. These sites are usually targeted towards a specific niche, so they have related products that they are promoting.

•    Lead Generation – Often we see lawyers and realtors doing this. They want to seem like industry leaders in their small communities. They do not have the bandwidth to produce quality content, so they go out and scrape content from other sources. Sometimes, they are not even aware of this because they are paying some scumbag $30/month to add content and help them get better SEO. We have encountered quite a few of these in the past.

•    Advertising Revenue – Some folks just want to create a “hub” of knowledge. A one-stop-shop for users in a specific niche. If I had a penny for every time someone has done this with our content, then we would have a few hundred pennies. Often we notice that our site content is being scraped. The scraper always replies, I was doing this for the good of the community. Except the site is plastered with ads.

These are just a few reasons why someone would steal your content.

Source:http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-preventing-blog-content-scraping-in-wordpress/

Choose the Best Data Mining Company With This Simple Rule

Data mining is the analysis part of the knowledge finding in databases. It involves finding patterns in large data sets including processes like artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems. The main reason why companies do data mining is to transform a large set of data into understandable block of information that can be used for market knowledge. It allows companies to make informed business decisions.

Data mining was looked upon as a luxury until some time back, but businesses are waking up to the importance of the process by seeing the difference it makes. Most of the multinational corporations already have mining integrated as one of their core processes. Many companies don't make strategic decisions unless they have the complete data converted into useful information using mining techniques. However, it is not a cheap process and would require being put to good use in order to be able to justify its cost. This results in a demand of a data mining company that could fulfill the client's needs by being resourceful and economical at the same time.

Searching for the perfect data mining company for your business could become a lot easier if you follow one simple rule. The rule is to make sure you make enough strategic decisions that result in good profit or at least break even with a single session of mining the data, which allows you to justify the cost you put into the whole process. Then, choose the company that offers you the best quotation which allows you to maximize your profits and improve your business processes even more.

Most companies are not very stringent with their plans and pricing and would be happy to go that extra mile in order to help the client. That extra mile could include offering a discount on the whole process, or offering added services or extended time period in the same package and price as quoted. The way you negotiate with the company will decide the profit that you will make from the entire data mining process.

Data mining will not only improve your business decisions, it will improve your business processes as a whole. If used correctly, it will allow you to extract more out of the limited resources. It allows you to have comprehensive real time market knowledge that always keeps you ahead of your competitors. Therefore, putting in a few extra bucks to integrate it into your core business process is a really good idea. As mentioned earlier, if used correctly then it will not only justify its own cost but also increase profits manifold.

Choose the right company by integrating the whole process in your business and make the most of the market knowledge that is present on the internet. The power to make the best and the most informed decisions lies in your own hands, and data mining is one approach that will certainly get you a lot closer to your business goals.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Choose-the-Best-Data-Mining-Company-With-This-Simple-Rule&id=8784911

Excellent Data Scraping Services Of Datascrapingservices.us

Data Scraping is a process in which different web sites or other sources to gather relevant information. Data Scraping services to gather important information to organizations that helped a lot of decisions and marketing strategies to help. Data Scraping services, even the companies that want a database of important information to help develop.

By applying Data Scraping services to organizations to increase profits, reduce risks and are able to identify scams. All important information you need to develop a database, Data Scraping can be very useful for you. It is a known fact that the most popular Internet tool is used to collect data, but it can be a time consuming task.

It is better for Data Scraping services, which vary according to your needs and all types of websites can collect data for any assignment. Bespoke web Data Scraping, data extraction services to various organizations are known as the offered services. You only company offering quality web services for data extraction should be carried out under the ethical approach.

Data Scraping Services can be defined as the process of retrieving data from a different source processes unstructured or store. Data extraction is very useful for large organizations that manage large amounts of data on a daily basis to be converted into information and stored for later use. Data extraction is a systematic way to extract and organize data from distributed and semi-structured electronic documents available online and in stores different data.

In business world today, very competitive, critical information, such as statistics on the number of customers and competitors use sales between the companies play an important role in policymaking. By signing the provider of Data Scraping, you can access data critical various sources, including websites, databases, images and documents.

We also provide Web data extraction services to retrieve data from web pages are included in the process involved. Web pages, HTML, XHTML, PHP, ASP, etc., for different languages, such as data from web pages are designed using scraps, all according to an API that is designed to extract data from web sites need help.

Web data extraction services relevant to the extent the research, and research companies have become the main activity of this day. The need for new companies to implement policies and strategies to stay informed with changing trends occur. The only possible efficient data extraction is done on a regular basis.

Data scraping can help you make strategic decisions that shape their business objectives. If your customer information and nuggets, the activities of its jurisdiction and determine the performance of your organization, it is very important information on hand at any time.

Scrape data from the software using the website is the proven process of extracting data from the web. The retrieved data for the world according to the wishes of all the important information such as the Internet can be used in various industries. We offer the best web software for data extraction. We have expertise and Web mining, the end view of knowledge, end screen, emails services, Data Scraping to extract capture the Internet.

So, whether you need to extract or scrape or want to mining text, images or any kind of data, you can rely on professional data extraction services provider, www.datascrapingservices.us for all your data mining and web data extracting and website data scraping requirements.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/excellent-data-scraping-services-of-datascrapingservicesus-5336770.html

Have You Ever Heard To Web Scraping Expert Use Business Information?

Have you ever heard of "data scraping?" Scaling of the use of information and data scraping technology made his fortune many a successful trader is not new technology. Sometimes website owners automated harvesting of your data can not be happy with sitting

Fortunately there is a modern solution to this problem. Proxy data scraping technology solves the problem by using proxy IP addresses. Scraping data each time you run the program, organized the evacuation of a website, the website thinks that it comes from a different IP address. For website owners, worldwide only a short period of increased traffic from the proxy data scraping sounds.

Now you might be asking yourself: "Can the technology proxy data scraping project?" Certainly better than the choice is dangerous and unreliable (but) free public proxy servers.

There are literally thousands of the world that is quite easy to free proxy servers are all on. But the trick is finding them. Many sites list hundreds of servers, but open to find, and the protocol perseverance, trial and error, works for one of the first lessons you something about server to server, or do not know what activities are going for. A public proxy requests or sensitive data transmitted through a bad idea.

A less risky scenario for proxy data for scraping a rotating proxy connection goes through many private IP addresses to hire.

Scrape data from the software-only website is the proven process of extracting data from the Web. Offer the best of the web software to extract data. We have the expertise and knowledge in web data extraction, image, display, email extract, eliminate services, data mining and web intervene to eliminate.

For example, many companies based on their own needs, in particular, helped to find the data.

Data collection

Generally, data, information, automated computer programs for processing by the appropriate structures transmission. Such formats and protocols are usually strictly structured, well-documented, easily decompose, and confusion to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human readable.

Tractor unit that automatically Extractor is an email from a reliable source that the e-mail ID helps to remove. This is fundamentally different than web pages, HTML files, text files or other format, business services contacts duplicate email addresses without.

A web spider is a computer program that a methodical, automated or surf the World Wide Web in a systematic way. Especially the many sites in the search engines, up-to-date information, as a means to quickly use.

Proxy data scraping technology solves the problem by using proxy IP addresses. Every time your data scraping program is a production of a website, the website that comes from a different IP address. The owner of this website, proxy data from around the world in an increase in traffic looks exactly like scraping the short term.

Now you might be asking yourself, "my project where I can get the data scraping proxy technology?" "Do it yourself" solution, but unfortunately, there is no need to call. Consider hosting the proxy server you choose to rent, but this option is quite pricey, but definitely better than the alternative is incredibly dangerous (but) free public proxy server.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/have-you-ever-heard-to-web-scraping-expert-use-business-information-6250856.html