web-scraping

I've been building web scrapers for years. BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium — I've used them all. But last month I hit a wall. A client needed me to extract product data from a site that changed its HTML structure every few days. One week the price was in a <span class="price"> , the next it was inside a <div> with a random ID. My scraper kept breaking, and I was spending more time fixing selector…

Bluesky hit 40 million users earlier this year, and unlike Twitter, it runs on an open protocol — the AT Protocol — where public data is genuinely public and machine-readable by design. No $5,000/month enterprise API tier. No rate limits you need a lawyer to understand. Just a clean REST API that anyone can query. I wanted to scrape it. Here's how I built a production-ready actor and what I learn…

When you need Letterboxd Film & Review as a recurring feed, the gap between "got a few rows out" and "have a clean nightly dataset in the warehouse" is wider than it looks. Here is the pipeline I sketched out, with the decisions I made at each step. Source survey Letterboxd Scraper Films, Ratings, Reviews & User Data Scrape films, ratings, cast & crew, genres, and user reviews from Letterboxd, t…

Google narrowed developer access to its web-search tools in January, while Cloudflare documented broader controls for blocking or challenging AI crawlers. Together, those changes have made ai web scraping more constrained at both the search layer and the site-access layer. The squeeze is practical, not abstract. Google’s changes affect how developers get URLs and search results at scale; Cloudfla…

Amazon’s Product Advertising API: The Access Problem Amazon’s Product Advertising API (PA-API 5.0) is powerful — when you can use it. The catch? You need an active Amazon Associates account with at least 3 qualifying sales in the past 30 days just to maintain access. For new developers, researchers, and startups building price comparison tools or product databases, this creates a chicken-and-egg …

Korea has a real estate problem. Not in the market — in the data. Naver Real Estate (land.naver.com) is South Korea's dominant property platform. Millions of Koreans check it before every apartment decision: buying, renting, investing. It's where prices are listed, where transactions happen, where the market shows its face. But there's no official API. Not restricted. Not paid. Not deprecated. No…

Telegram has 950+ million monthly active users and has become the go-to platform for crypto communities, news channels, research groups, and brand communications. If you need to scrape Telegram channels , extract messages, reactions, media, or metadata from public Telegram channels — for OSINT research, competitive analysis, crypto monitoring, or academic projects — this guide covers everything y…

Web scraping the Apple App Store opens up a world of data for market researchers, app developers, and competitive analysts. Whether you're tracking competitor rankings, monitoring review sentiment, or gathering app metadata at scale, understanding how to extract data from the App Store is an essential skill. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk through the structure of the Apple App Store, wha…