As a designer/developer, you occasionally run into a website job that involves interfacing with an outside system. Getting the data onto your site without resorting to older, less elegant methods (like using frames, which means chopping the screen space into 2 or more pieces so web pages can share the space within one browser window) can be a true challenge, but it is not a lost cause. Today there are free, open technologies that make working with ugly, outside data a much nicer experience.Consider this scenario:You get hired to re-design a site that is nearly 100% frames-based. You want the new site youâ??re going to build to lose the frames so it is more user friendly, but how can you get the content from another site into the new one youâ??re building? Page scraping is the answer.What is page scraping? Page scraping is the act of pulling up one page, â??scrapingâ? the content from it, then sticking it into your own page, all within one user request. No frames, just a nice plain page.
Writing
Website Plastic Surgery - using page scraping to beautify ugly outside data
December 9, 2007
From the archive. I've left this one just as I wrote it.