I love these tools but before I invest more of my time leveraging this in my workflow I'd want to know that it'll be around for another few months at least...
I've seen something similar more than once on HN but my google-fu is failing. What other similar services are out there that'll let you smartly scrape a page into a spreadsheet.
In the past, I've tried Google spreadsheets with "ImportXML" option but got frustrated after a bit and resorted to python.
What Open Source projects are similar? It seems like data transformation tasks like this are a universal problem. I'd just do map/reduce, but that's the advantage that comes with being a developer. Great tools for non-developers to do limited programming tasks are incredibly useful.
Check out Diffbot @ http://www.diffbot.com/ -- you can setup repeat crawls and extract data into .csv/Excel file format or JSON with Crawlbot API, extract data automatically with automatic APIs, or Custom API Toolkit. You can get a free trial account at https://www.diffbot.com/plans/trial to try it out, and you can get paid plans at http://www.diffbot.com/pricing/.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 42.8 ms ] threadSupport for email and HTML tables seem to be some distinguishing features of this one.
I love these tools but before I invest more of my time leveraging this in my workflow I'd want to know that it'll be around for another few months at least...
We're starting to move TaskPipes out of beta at the moment, but our pricing will start at $50/month for the service
In the past, I've tried Google spreadsheets with "ImportXML" option but got frustrated after a bit and resorted to python.
Allows you to scrape then import that data into a google spreadsheet. But its not the only way to consume the data.