Re: Problems with Spidering Hack #56

[Joel Rees]

Thanking Morbus and Bad Influence for the chuckles,
[...] - what I think /should/ dissuade people is the book's age, and 
more particularly, the book's topic. Spidering and scraping, by their 
nature, require ever-evolving scripts, and while I tried to show 
various techniques throughout the book - techniques that would help 
people write and modify the scripts on their own - I suspect a good 
portion of the included scripts are no longer usable. The web just 
changes too much for a spidering/scraping script published/written a 
year and a half ago to work verbatim without modification. As such, 
anyone hoping to buy the book and get 80 out-of-the-page scripts is 
going to have a bit of unexpected work cut out for them.
So, Kevin, since age is an implicit problem with hacks, will there by 
any chance be something along the lines of a web site tracking the 
utility of the scripts and maybe containing suggestions and code for 
updating them? Maybe it could be set up to allow readers like Lola to 
post their notes?

--
Joel Rees
    Nothing to say today
    so I'll say nothing:
    Nothing.