Hi, I've been hanging around the IRC channel at Freenode for over a week now and thought I'd introduce myself as a GSoC participant as well. It was never my plan to work around Scrapy for GSoC (as this is your first year participating) but since I am currently using Scrapy, I want the chance to contribute at the same time.
About me personally, I'll have my undergrad by the summer as a student at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. My greatest passions have always been the various web technologies around and more recently Artificial Intelligence. I'm working on getting a blog up but due to a terrible host I won't disclose the URL for the moment. The ideas page lists an intermediate task about an HTTP API for Scrapy Spiders, a task that probably fits me best. The mentor listed is Shane Evans, which is just my bad luck as he seems to be a busy guy. I've got some ideas around this project so if anything would be willing to (informally) talk them over it would be greatly appreciated. As soon as I started using Scrapy I had this short but vivid dream of simply anyone having access to Srapy through a browser plugin that would interactively and visually construct spiders for the user, without the user ever having to touch any Python code. Later I thought I'd found exactly this idea on one of your ideas page but I can't seem to find it again. This is a project I would love to work on even more than the aforementioned one but I'm still investigating the feasibility. But let's be honest, it would be really cool if you could just select some text on a page as a certain 'thing', click links for the crawler to investigate and make it crawl all that for you. This is even more of a shout-out to any interested users or developers to discuss this subject with me, because this is what I'd love to focus on. Be it technical or simply talking ideas, just give me a holla. For the next couple of weeks you'll see me at #scrapy as Randomaniac and around the mailing lists. I'm planning on delving into the scrapy code to familiarise myself and hopefully manage a couple of patches where needed at the same time. Cheers! Ruben PS: If the mentor of the original browser plugin idea reads this, please get back to me so we can compare our visions on the matter. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "scrapy-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/scrapy-users. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
