Saturday, 28 December 2013

Cloud-based Business ideas

Are you interested in starting a cloud based business? If yes, then below are the top ten cloud based business ideas you can start from home.

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “internet-based computing whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand.”

Given the explanation above, popular platforms like Slideshare, Skype, Gmail, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Amazon AWS and Cloudfront, Dropbox and WordPress can reasonably be included in a list of cloud applications; because they all hold your data (presentation slides, emails, videos, blog posts, etc), so you don’t have to worry about them.

Cloud computing provides a much more reliable alternative to keeping files on your own computer; a mode of storage that has been rendered insecure due to the emergence of various types of viruses and other threats to information security.

On the surface, cloud computing has many advantages over traditional methods of data storage. For example, if you store your data in a cloud-based retrieval system, you will be able to get back your data from any location that has internet access. And you wouldn’t need to carry around your physical storage device or use the same computer to save and retrieve your information. In fact, in the absence of security concerns, you could even allow other people to access the data, thereby turning a personal project into collaborative effort.

Like any other innovation that offers huge solutions for individuals and businesses, cloud computing has created huge opportunities for entrepreneurs who have a knack for computers and ICT. If you have a solid background in ICT and in-depth knowledge of cloud computing, then starting a cloud-based business might just be a life-changing business move for you. Without wasting time, below are 10 cloud-based business ideas that you can exploit for long-term income:

Top 10 Cloud-based Business ideas

1. Cloud computing consulting

Many individuals and businesses are becoming aware of the benefits of cloud computing and its advantages over traditional storage methods. But most people feel completely at sea when it comes to understanding how to move their systems and files onto the cloud storage platform. You can make a lot of money helping such individuals and businesses migrate to the cloud.

2. Tutoring

For security and other reasons, many individuals and businesses would fret at the idea of hiring a freelance contractor to help them with their migration to cloud. Rather, such individuals would prefer to learn how it works, so that they can handle the migration themselves.

Similarly, many businesses would prefer hiring you to train their in-house staff on the application of cloud computing. So, you can make a lot of money from just teaching people how to apply cloud computing to their businesses.

3. File hosting

If you have the required background and expertise, then you can make a lot of money by setting up your own platform for helping people hold their files in the cloud. That is, you can set up a cloud storage solution like Dropbox, Google Doc, Amazon AWS and Evernote, and charge people for helping them hold their files.

4. Cloud platform engineering

With a solid background in software or systems engineering, you can make money working as a cloud platform engineer. This position goes beyond helping individuals and businesses migrate to cloud; it also involves actually handling all of the technicalities and intricacies involved. After the initial setup process, you would be called on at intervals for maintenance and routine checks. And of course, you will get paid each time.

5. Cloud computing technologist

This involves working with companies that provide cloud-computing solutions. As a cloud-computing technologist, you will work with the company’s engineers to set up the company’s platform and packages. You will also help to set a user-friendly interface for their customers.

6. Cloud OS developer

A cloud OS developer analyzes, designs, programs, debugs, and modifies software enhancements and/or new products used in local, networked, or internet-related computer programs, primarily for end users.

As a cloud OS developer, you will also be required to test applications and interact with users to define system requirements and necessary modifications. You will earn a lot of money working for companies as an independent contractor. And there is no limit to the number of companies you can work with.

7. Cloud automation engineering

Working as an automation engineer, you will be responsible for deep automation of cloud services that will enable the company’s software development team to rapidly prototype, build, and deploy product offering to their customers. You will need to deeply understand cloud architectures and arrangements.

8. Cloud software engineering – This simply involves developing software that will ease the use of the cloud platform.

9. Web hosting

Yes, the popular web hosting is an application of cloud computing, since you will help individuals and businesses hold their web files and keep the secure. So you can set up you  own web hosting company and make money.

10. Blogging (on cloud)

Because many people are yet to fully understand how cloud works, you can make a lot of money in the long term by starting a blog that discusses everything about cloud computing.

Source:http://www.mytopbusinessideas.com/cloud-based/

Friday, 27 December 2013

Hiring A Pro Air Duct Cleaning Service

When hiring a company that gives you air duct cleaning services you should use normal sense. Do some background investigation of the organizations you are thinking about. With the world-wide-web you can readily discover about any organisations you are looking at and uncover out if they have a history of enterprise complaints. You ought to ask any firm you are thinking about hiring questions about your air conditioning technique and make confident they are knowledgeable about their perform.

Are they licensed? A large number of states call for suppliers that clean air ducts to be licensed, if they should be and are not then this is a definite red flag. It’s also extremely critical to acquire an estimate in writing and inform the business that any significant adjustments in what they charge desires to be authorized by you prior to they continue functioning.

As with all factors of household repair and maintenance cleaning out dirty ducts is critical. Allowing ductwork to turn into excessively dusty can have a damaging influence on your health and could possibly lessen the life of your air conditioning method. Anytime contemplating hiring any corporation to work on your dwelling make certain you are informed about them. Do a small research, ask them concerns, and obtain estimates in writing. Any respected company ought to be content to talk with you about the work they will be performing as properly as give you a written estimate.

Hiring a organization that gives air duct cleaning services is just like hiring any other contractor, as lengthy as they are a reputable enterprise they really should present you with high quality service. So if you discover a lot of dust about your air conditioning vents don’t ignore the difficulty or place it off until it gets to be out of hand. Employ a enterprise that presents air duct cleaning solutions to assistance protect the wellness of your loved ones and the overall performance of your air conditioner.

Source:http://www.tampabaycleaning.com/176-hiring-a-pro-air-duct-cleaning-service-4

Thursday, 26 December 2013

Benefits Of Article Writing Services

Even if you are a good author, you could want to think about employing post creating providers for your on the web company. High quality articles improvement needs treasured time and talent, and making use of post writing companies makes it possible for you and your personnel to focus on other critical aspects of your business. When you allow other people take care of branding, search engine optimization, and consumer-friendly articles generation, you can dedicate more time to building your merchandise, assisting your customers, and every little thing else that sets your company apart from the competitors. Here are some of the positive aspects of large-quality report creating solutions.

Readable, Intriguing Articles or blog posts

No matter what product you promote or support you provide Jeff Carter Jersey, your website needs to cater to your clients. You need to have articles that not only pitches a sale, but that readers will really engage prolonged enough to develop interest in your business. Fantastic write-up writing solutions specialize in delivering grammatically ideal, nicely-structured pieces which efficiently and entertainingly deliver your business's unique offering place. Retain the services of great writers, and you'll have far more time to really deliver on that place.

Branding, Authority, and a Loyal Readership

At a time when thousands of websites seem to supply the identical merchandise, solutions, and material, branding is crucial to your lengthy-term achievement. When folks visit your website, they want to see new, fresh material that delivers a message they have not currently read through tens or hundreds of times. They want something distinctive. Fantastic writers will set up the uniqueness of your enterprise by adapting to and additional building your website's fashion. They will also research your niche in buy to write articles with a tone that speaks right to your readers' deepest desires. By employing a fantastic content support, you can create yourself as an authority in your discipline and create a loyal group of readers who will ultimately turn out to be buyers.

Commitment and Professionalism

One of the largest difficulties with basic Search engine optimization and internet style firms is that they target on also a lot of projects and sub-projects at as soon as Drew Doughty Jersey, creating an overall item that is decent but unremarkable. They exemplify the "jack of all trades, master of none" clichA? and their customers endure simply because of it. On the other hand, a committed article writing services puts its total team's target into creating and editing superior posts for your website. Hiring a creating crew in addition to a net design service could expense a lot more in the brief phrase, but the impeccable articles you get will spend for itself hundreds of times more than with large site visitors and conversion prices.

Search engine optimisation Material that Converts

Numerous world wide web development companies appear at Search engine marketing and user-friendly content as totally separate entities. The dilemma with this mentality is that purely "search engine-pleasant" content articles are usually rife with uninteresting filler articles and unreadable, key phrase-stuffed sentences. To stay away from littering your stylish web site with this type of fluff , you need to have to have articles that is each highly readable and optimized for site visitors Jonathan Quick Jersey. Good article creating firms expertly weave key phrases and LSI terms into your messages to create articles or blog posts which will attain substantial search engine rankings and convert the readers who click on them.

Source:http://bpel.xml.org/blog/benefits-of-article-writing-services

Tuesday, 17 December 2013

Building a Website Scraper using Chrome and Node.js

A couple of months back, I did a proof of concept to build a scraper entirely in JavaScript, using webkit (Chrome) as a parser and front-end.

Having investigated seemingly expensive SaaS scraping software, I wanted to tease out what the challenges are, and open the door to some interesting projects. I have some background in data warehousing, and a little exposure to natural language processing, but in order to do any of those things I needed a source of data.

The dataset I built is 58,000 Flippa auctions, which have fairly well-structured pages with fielded data. I augmented the data by doing a crude form of entity extraction to see what business models or partners are most commonly mentioned in website auctions.

Architecture

I did the downloading with wget, which worked great for this. One of my concerns with the SaaS solution I demoed, is that if you made a mistake in parsing one field, you might have to pay to re-download some subset of the data.

One of my goals was to use a single programming language. In my solution, each downloaded file is opened in a Chrome tab, parsed, and then closed. I used Chrome because it is fast, but this should be easily portable to Firefox, as the activity within Chrome is a Greasemonkey script. Opening the Chrome tabs is done through Windows Scripting Host (WSH). The chrome extension connects to a Node.js server to retrieve the actual parsing code and save data back to a Postgres database. Having JavaScript on both client and server was fantastic for handling the back and forth communication. Despite the use of a simple programming language, the three scripts (WSH, Node.js, and Greasemonkey) have very different APIs and programming models, so it’s not as simple as I would like. Being accustomed to Apache, I was a little disappointed that I had to track down a script just to keep Node.js running.

Incidentally, WSH is using Internet Explorer (IE) to run its JavaScript; this worked well, unlike the typical web programming experience with IE. My first version of the script was a cygwin bash script, which involved too much resource utilization (i.e. threads) for cygwin to handle. Once I switched to WSH I had no further problems of that sort, which is not surprising considering its long-standing use in corporate environments.

Challenges

By this point, the reader may have noticed that my host environment is Windows, chosen primarily to get the best value from Steam. The virtualization environment is created on VirtualBox using Vagrant and Chef, which make creating virtual machines fairly easy. Unfortunately, it is also easy to destroy them. I kept the data on the main machine, backed up in git, to prevent wasting days of downloading. This turned out to be annoying because it required dealing with two operating systems (Ubuntu and Windows), which have different configuration settings for networking.

As the data volume increased, I found many new defects with this approach. Most were environmental issues, such as timeouts and settings for the maximum number of TCP connections (presumably these are low by default in Windows to slow the spread of bots).

Garbage collection also presented an issue, since the Chrome processes consume resources at an essentially fixed rate (their memory disappears when the process ends). The garbage collection in Node.js causes a sawtooth memory pattern. During this process many Chrome tabs open. The orchestration script must watch for this in order to slow down and allow Node.js to catch up. This script should also pause if the CPU overheats; unfortunately I have not been able to read CPU temperature. Although this capability is supposedly supported by Windows APIs, it is not supported either by Intel’s drivers or my chip.

Successes

A while back I read about Netflix’s Chaos Monkey and tried to apply its principle of assuming failure to my system. Ideally a parsing script should not stop in the middle of a several day run, so it is necessary to handle errors gracefully. Although the scripts have fail-retry logic, it unfortunately differs in each. Node.js restarts if it crashes because it is running tandem with Forever. The orchestration script doesn’t seem to crash, but supports resumption at any point, and watches the host machine to see if it should slow down. The third script, the Chrome extension, watches for failures from RPC calls, and does exponential backoff to retry.

Using the browser as a front-end gives you a free debugger and script interface, as well as a tool to generate xpath expressions.

Possibilities

The current script runs five to ten thousand entries before requiring attention. I intend to experiment with PhantomJS in order to improve performance, enable sharding, and support in-memory connections.

Source:http://www.garysieling.com/blog/building-a-website-scraper-using-chrome-and-node-js

Monday, 16 December 2013

Data Mining With a Web Screen Scraping Software

Data collection from websites is a time consuming job hence you need a dedicated team to collect online data. Or you need a web screen scraping program that could download the required data in a suitable format. Choose software instead of relying on data mining team. The software could make your job a lot easier.

Advantages of using software

ItâEUR(TM) s time saving. You could complete a project in as little as one hour, if itâEUR(TM)s a short project like collecting contact details of targeted audiences from certain websites. Another advantage of this software is that it would free your data mining team from the tedious job. In this way, you would be able to utilize that team in other productive projects. In other words, using the software would improve your teamâEUR(TM)s productivity.

The software would arrange the data in the format that is suitable for you. For instance you could get Vcard details in spreadsheet and save the file for future use. Similarly you could get the data in the format suitable for market research, price comparison and business intelligence. The software would take care that you get the information in the format that is readable, understandable and convenient for you.

It would give you latest and authentic data. You could make mistakes in downloading the data like missing important information but there is no such apprehension with software. It would provide you information just like itâEUR(TM)s available on the web.

The software would be programmed to suit to your needs. It would be dedicated for your projects only. Since it would be coded for you, you could improve its functionality and usability as and required. For instance you could use the program to help your visitors fill forms. There could be more uses of the program.

For web screen scraping program, you could contact a reliable service provider. Since there are many groups that provide content scraping service, you could shop around to locate the most reliable service provider. You would be charged a price for the service but you could find most affordable service so that you donâEUR(TM)t feels pressure on your pocket.

If you need web content and you mine data manually then you should consider using web screen scraping service. You could get the data you need by paying a small amount. The software would provide you latest data that you could rely upon.

Source: http://goarticles.com/article/Data-Mining-With-a-Web-Screen-Scraping-Software/7761459/

The Alternative To Content-Writing Services: Free Unique Articles For Your Web 2.0s

Content-writing services can be expensive especially when a large amount of articles is needed for SEO purposes, but there is an alternative. I love being honest and transparent about everything I do in Internet marketing. This applies to the relationships that I try to establish with my readers and customers, as well as to the SEO techniques I employ while trying to make it to the top of Google. For a new site such as mine, however, employing only White Hat techniques may never bring it to success. Getting links from established sites is not easy when your site has no traffic and no reputation. Some Gray Hat and a very few Black Hat techniques can come in handy.

One such technique is building supporting Web sites to serve as ‘link sources‘ for the money-making site. The idea is to build a low-to-medium-quality-content site, similar to the niche sites that used to dominate Google before the advent of Panda and Penguin. Poorer-quality links are used to support the site and spammy links to these links will give it more authority. Here is a diagram to show you how the strategy works.

Today, I am not going to go into the details of this tactic for backlink creation, but I want to focus on the tier-two sites, the low-to-medium-quality blogs that link directly to the money site. These sites can be normal Web sites lust like the money site itself. The host needs to be different from the one the money site is on, because Google does not count links connecting two sites using the same IP address. This is important. Some months ago, it made the difference between page one of Google and the Sandbox to me. Another option, is to use Web 2.0 properties such as WordPress (the commercial site), Blogger, Weebly or a billion others.

These sites allow their users to build blogs for free, although the options are limited and the content is moderated. Content is precisely the subject of this article. In the post-Panda and post-Penguin age, building one-paged Web sites as tier-two link sources no longer works. A blog that is constantly updated and filled with many, original articles is required to achieve the goal at hand. I go for two new articles per month. That is not a lot for one site, but when you consider that twenty or thirty sites on tier two, it can become a bit scary.

What the heck, Arthur?! How are we supposed to do that? Two new articles every month for thirty sites is sixty articles a month. You need to employ dozens of content-writing-service companies and pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get that job done. You’re a fool as usual…

Mr. Huggins would be correct, if not for the fact that I have found a pretty sweet trick to get decent, readable, lengthy and unique articles, which can be prepared for publication in ten minutes each. That is six articles per hour. Since you, I hope, are not visually impaired as I am, you should take no more than 3-5 minutes to have each article done. Even assuming six articles per hour, this means that in four hours you can have a year worth of articles ready for one site. So how do I do it? There are various ways to get cheap, free, unique articles without having to pay expensive content-writing services to have them written out for you.

spinnerchief 1. Spun Articles—Write one article, use software such as Spinnerchief and create multiple copies of the article that will be worded slightly differently to pass copyscrape tests. The problem with this method is that the topic of the article and the sense will be the same, no matter how clever your spinning technique is. A Web site with twenty-four articles all containing the same information is not a low-to-medium-quality site; it is a spam-quality site. Most Web 2.0 sites will detect it as spam and delete it before Google can even send it to the sandbox. This is not an option here.

2. Article Directories—Sites such as Ezine Articles or Go Articles allow publishers to copy their content provided that the author is credited and links in the article are not modified. This method does not work either, because unique articles are needed for the tier-two sites to rank in Google. Since the articles have already been published on another site, namely the article directory itself, they will not be considered to be unique. This is another option better not be considered.

3. The Encoded Article Method—This method involves copying an article from Ezine Articles or another popular directory and using free software to spin the character encoding of the article. This technique is little known, and strictly a Black Hat technique. An example will enlighten any confused readers. This is the letter ‘r’ in standard English encoding: r. This is the letter ‘r’ from a different, encoded set of characters: r. The two ‘r’ look exactly the same, but they are not. This Web application will change the encoding of any text that you enter into the input text area. The resulting article will look the same, but rather than the standard English characters the text will be replaced by different ones that look like them, but are not.

As a result if you copy and then paste the output to a word processor, most of the text will be marked as having spelling mistakes. The advantage of using this method is that the resulting article can be read by humans and will appear to computers to be unique and different from the original article from which it was copied. The disadvantage is that Google can examine the article, and easily find out what it is. Since this is a Black Hat method, penalties will follow. If detection and penalties are not in force yet, as many Black Hat SEOs claim, they will be in force soon. This is not the method I recommend. My rule of thumb for doing SEO is this: If a human being can find out that it is an artificial link by looking at it, then Google can find out too, or will be able to do so shortly.

4. Foreign Article Directory and Translation Method—This is the method I use to fill up my tier-two sites with quality content in seconds and without having to resort to expensive content-writing services. I use these Italian article directories as sources for my articles:

The are many other Italian directories, and there is no need to speak the language that the source article is in. I could go for Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Finnish or even Japanese and Arabic ones.

    To start the job go to the Bing On-Line Translator. I have found that Bing is the service that does the job best for Italian articles. You can experiment with other services available on line, if you prefer.

    Type in the keywords that best describe the topic of your Web site in Bing and translate them to Italian or another language of the article directory. This will translate your keywords to the target language.

    Use the keywords translated by Bing to search in the foreign article directory for relevant articles.

    Copy and paste the whole article into Bing and translate it into English. Read the article carefully, and correct any gross translation mistakes.

    Add a link to your money site somewhere in the article. You can now use your article in your Web 2.0 property.

It is entirely up to you and your conscience whether you want to leave the credit to the original author and the link to his site. To see examples, you may wish to subscribe to Linkz, where I share all the links I use for my own sites.

The resulting articles will be readable, unique and convincing. They will be enough to persuade both Google and the moderators on Web 2.0s that your blog is genuine. This is a valid alternative to spending a fortune on content-writing services for your tier-two supporting sites without spending too much time writing content for them. If you enjoyed this tip, or have some of your own to add for generating content easily without giving away quality completely, make sure to comment below.

Source:http://moneyearningsites.net/the-alternative-to-content-writing-services-free-unique-articles-for-your-web-2-0s/

SEO Articles – Why You Must Buy SEO Articles After Google Penguin 2.0 Update?

Publishing SEO articles on the website or blog is a daily chore for many business owners. It is very necessary to understand how to write these articles in a simple way so that it makes it easier for the search engines to display the information immediately when asked for specific information. There has been a vast competition on the World Wide Web and so it is evident from this that the content must be good so that it attracts the traffic. Article writing is the best source to promote the business and the site. One must accumulate the entire information essential to write the article and then think about the keywords people might use when probing for the information.

The SEO keywords must be incorporated in the article in such a way that they read naturally. Google exhibits the website in order of significance and Google ranking denotes the place of a website in the search results. An important on-page optimization principle to improve your site’s ranking on Google is not to make use of the keyword repeatedly but rather they should be optimized and must go with the flow.

The SEO articles must be written without any grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. The article should be given a suitable title and should be alienated into short paragraphs and sub headers.  It must be well written and be competent to give or present a new angle on the specific topic. The keywords can be highlighted in italic or bold, but must not be overused. Building links to the article is the best way to let the world know about it and this is possible through links like Facebook and Twitter.

Lots of article writing services such as Content Inc are available on the internet. These are specialized in creating content and help in generating links for businesses. They are also experts in modernizing and revising old back link techniques to go with the swiftly developing internet and web marketing. They provide top quality services that are handled manually. It is a well known fact that an artificial way of creating links can elevate a red flag with Panda and one would be running the jeopardy of getting disqualified on Google and other search engines.

The Google penguin 2.0 update is a most important update that will have great impact on the rankings on Google for lots of sites. It has been called as Google penguin 2.0 update as it is the first update of penguin that has altered the algorithm instead of a refresh. This brand new generation of algorithms has a large impact on smaller areas and goes much deeper.  The range of Penguin 2.0 update varies by language and it is the basis of much conjecture these days.

One can buy SEO articles after the Google penguin 2.0 update as it says that one must indulge in building quality links and use fresh and quality content for the same. The main benefit of writing SEO articles is that they drive traffic and adding fresh SEO optimized articles helps to recognize the site by the search engines as a clout on the area under discussion. This update has been with the intention of improving the search result quality and because of this many low content websites have faded off. Their ranking has been replaced with sites that have quality content and hence it has paved a way to SEO articles that are meaningful and informative.

It is only creative and effective articles that achieve higher SERPS and credit is given to those articles that are about 400-500 words in length and that are informative and can keep the readers engaged. Quality SEO Articles assist the client to improve their search engine rankings. They also help the businesses to grow and these services can be obtained from  an SEO article writing service such as Content Inc as we provide  cost effective solutions. We write 100% unique and informative articles that are geared towards one’s position.

Source:http://contentinc.biz/seo-articles-why-you-must-buy-articles-after-google-penguin-2-0-update/

Friday, 13 December 2013

How to scrape Yellow Pages with ScreenScraper Chrome Extension

Recently I was asked to help with the job of scraping company information from the Yellow Pages website using the ScreenScraper Chrome Extension. After working with this simple scraper, I decided to create a tutorial on how to use this Google Chrome Extension for scraping pages similar to this one. Hopefully, it will be useful to many of you.

1. Install the Chrome Extension

You can get the extension here. After installation you should see a small monitor icon in the top right corner of your Chrome browser.

2. Open the source page

Let’s open the page from which you want to scrape the company information:

3. Determine the parent element (row)

The first thing you need to do for the scraping is to determine which HTML element will be the parent element. A parent element is the smallest HTML element that contains all the information items you need to scrape (in our case they are Company Name, Company Address and Contact Phone).  To some extent a parent element defines a data row in the resulting table.

To determine it, open Google Chrome Developer Tools (by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I), click the magnifying class (at the bottom of the window) and select the parent element on the page. I selected this one:

As soon as you have selected it, look into the developer tools window and you will see the HTML code related to this element:

As is seen from the highlighted HTML line, you can easily define a parent element by its class: listingInfoAndLogo.

5. Determine the information elements (columns)

After you have learned how to determine the parent element, it should be easy to specify the information elements that contain the information you want to scrape (they represent columns in the resultant table).

Just do this in the same way that you did it for the parent element -  by selecting it on the page:

As you can see, the company name is defined by businessName class.

6. Tune the ScreenScraper itself

After all the data elements you want to scrape are found, open the ScreenScraper by clicking the small monitor icon in the top-right corner of your browser. Then do the following:

    Enter the parent element class name (listingInfoAndLogo in our case) into the Selector field, preceding it with a dot (*see below for why)
    Click the Add Column button
    Enter a field’s name (any) into the Field text box
    Enter the information item class into the Selector text box, preceding it with a dot
    Repeat steps 2-4 for each information item element you want to be scraped

*You need to put a dot before the class name because the ScreenScraper requires element definition in CSS Selector format only (with a dot before it)

After you enter all these definitions you should see the preview of the scraped data at the bottom of the extension’s window:

That’s it! I hope the tutorial is clear enough. But if not, feel free to write your comments below and I’ll give additional explanations.

Source: http://extract-web-data.com/how-to-scrape-yellow-pages-with-screenscraper-chrome-extension/

Information About Craigslist Scraping Tools

Information is one amongst the foremost vital assets to a business.Whatever trade the business relies in, while not the crucialinformation that helps it to operate, it'll be left to die.However, you are doing not ought to hunt round the net or through pilesof resources so as to urge the data that you just would like. Instead,you can merely take the data that you just have already got and use itto your advantage.

With info being thus promptly accessible for big corporations, itmay be not possible to guess what precisely a corporation can would like this muchdata and data from. completely different jobs together with everything frommedical records analysis, to selling uses net hand tool technology inorder to compile info, analyze it and so use it for his or her ownpurposes.

Another reason that a corporation could utilize an internet hand tool is fordetection of changes. for instance, if you entered into a contract witha company to confirm that their net link stayed on your online page forsix months, they may use an internet hand tool to form certain that you just do notback out. this fashion they additionally don't ought to manually check yourwebsite a day to confirm that the link remains there. This savesthem from wasting their valuable labor prices.

Finally you'll be able to use an internet hand tool to urge all of the info concerning acompany that you just would like. whether or not you wish to seek out out what differentwebsites ar speech concerning your company, otherwise you merely need to seek out allof the data a few bound topic, employing a net hand tool is asimple, fast and simple answer.

There ar many various corporations that give you with the abilityto scrape the net for info. one amongst the businesses to lookat is Mozenda. Mozenda permits you to setup custom programs that scrapethe net for all differing types of knowledge, relying upon the exactneeds that your company has. Another net scraping company that ispopular is thirty Digits net Extractor. they assist you to extract theinformation that you just would like from a spread of internet sites and webapplications. you'll be able to use any type of alternative services to urge all ofyour information scraped from the online.

Web information scraping could be a growing business. There ar such a lot of industriesand businesses that use the data they get from net datascraping to accomplish quite bit. whether or not you would like to scrape information inorder to seek out personal info, past histories, compile databasesof factual info or another use it's terribly real and potential todo so! but, so as to use an internet hand tool effectively you mustmake certain to use a real company.

don't come with any company off thestreet, check that to visualize them against others within the trade. Ifworst involves worse, check drive many completely different corporations. Thenstick with the online hand tool that best meets your wants. check that thatyou let the online hand tool work for you, after all, the net is apowerful tool in your business!

Source: http://goarticles.com/article/Information-About-Craigslist-Scraping-Tools/7507586/

Thursday, 12 December 2013

Easy and Practical Web scraping in Python

This post is inspired by an excellent post called Web Scraping 101 with Python. It is a great intro to web scraping to Python, but I noticed two problems with it:

    It was slightly cumbersome to select elements
    It could be done easier

If you ask me, I would write such scraping scripts using an interactive interpreter like IPython and by using the simpler CSS selector syntax.

Let’s see how to create such throwaway scripts. For serious web scraping, Scrapy is a more complete solution when you need to perform repeated scraping or something more complex.

The Problem

We are going to solve the same problem mentioned in the first link. We are interested in knowing the winners of Chicago Reader’s Best of 2011. Unfortunately the Chicago Reader page shows only the five sections. Each of these sections contain award categories e.g. ‘Best vintage store’ in ‘Goods & Services’. Within each of these award category pages you will find the winner and runner up. Our mission is to collect the names of winners and runner ups for every award and present them as one simple list.

The Setup

Start python, IPython, bpython or any other interactive python interpreter of your choice. I shall be using IPython for the rest of this article.

A common starting point for most web parsing needs is getting a parsed web page from a URL. So let’s define our get_page function as follows:

from urllib2 import urlopen

from lxml.html import fromstring

def get_page(url):
    html = urlopen(url).read()
    dom = fromstring(html)
    dom.make_links_absolute(url)
    return dom

Within the get_page function, the first line downloads the page using urlopen function and returns it’s contents in the form of a string. The second line uses lxml to parse the string and returns the object representation of the page.

Since, most links in the html page will be relative pages we will convert them to absolute links. For e.g. a link like /about will be converted into http://www.chicagoreader.com/about. This makes it easy to call get_page function on such URLs later.

Selecting Page Elements

Next we need to invoke this function and select parts of the document. But before that we need to know which parts we need.

I prefer using CSS selector syntax compared to XPaths for selecting nodes. For examplem, the path to the same element in these two different syntax are shown below:

    CSS Path: html body#BestOf.BestOfGuide div#gridClamp div#gridMain div#gridFrame div#gridMainColumn div#StoryLayout.MainColumn div#storyBody.page1 strong p a

    XPath: /html/body/div[3]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[5]/div/strong/p[2]/a

CSS paths might be longer but are easier to understand. More importantly, they are easier to construct.

On Firefox, you can use Firebug to right click on any page element to get it’s CSS path.

Finding CSS paths in Firefox using Firebug

On Chrome, you will not be able to copy the CSS path but you can see it displayed on the status bar at the bottom

Finding CSS paths in Chrome

Selector Gadget

These CSS paths are extremely long and I wouldn’t recommend using them. They are too specific and tied to the overall document structure, which might change. Moreover, you can shorten a CSS selector path without affecting it’s specificity.

I recommend using a bookmarklet called Selector Gadget which elegantly solves both these problems. It also works across browsers.

First drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar. Open any page and click on the Selector Gadget to activate it. Now click on the element for which you want the CSS selector. Once you click an element, it will turn yellow and the CSS selector will appear in the gadget. Many other elements matching that selector will be also shown in yellow.

Sometimes, elements which you do not require are also matched. To eliminate that, click on an element you DO NOT want to match. Continue this process of selection and rejection till you get the exact CSS selector you want. Click on the ‘Help’ button for instructions.

Using iPython

Start your iPython interpreter and paste the lines of code, we saw previously:

$ ipython
Python 2.7.3 (default, Sep 26 2012, 21:51:14)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

IPython 0.13.1.rc2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
?         -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.
%quickref -> Quick reference.
help      -> Python's own help system.
object?   -> Details about 'object', use 'object??' for extra details.

In [1]: from urllib2 import urlopen

In [2]: from lxml.html import fromstring

In [3]: def get_page(url):
   ...:         html = urlopen(url).read()
   ...:         dom = fromstring(html)
   ...:         dom.make_links_absolute(url)
   ...:         return dom
   ...:

In [4]: dom = get_page("http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011/BestOf?oid=4100483")

In the last line, you retrieve the initial page you would like to be scraped and assign its parsed DOM object into dom.

In the next three commands, cssselect function is invoked with the CSS selector “#storyBody p a” to get all the section links. The result is a list. Since we need just the URLs, we run a list comprehension across the list of links.

In [5]: dom.cssselect("#storyBody p a")
Out[5]:
[<Element a at 0x336ae90>,
 <Element a at 0x336afb0>,
 <Element a at 0x336c2f0>,
 <Element a at 0x336c3b0>,
 <Element a at 0x336c170>,
 <Element a at 0x336c350>]

In [6]: [link.attrib['href'] for link in _]
Out[6]:
['http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-city-life/BestOf?oid=4106233',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-goods-and-services/BestOf?oid=4106022',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-sports-recreation/BestOf?oid=4106226',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-food-drink/BestOf?oid=4106228',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-arts-culture/BestOf?oid=4106230',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-music-nightlife/BestOf?oid=4106223']

In [7]: secns = _

Note that we are using the underscore ‘_’ symbol to refer to the result of the previous command. With this tip, we can avoid inventing names for temporary results. Also whenever we get a result worth keeping, we can name them in hindsight.

Finding all categories

Next we need to retrieve and parse each section page. It can be easily done with the following list comprehension. The second command is a nested list comprehension with two loops. As before, we just need the urls. All 389 of them, each representing an award category.

In [13]: doms = [get_page(secn) for secn in secns]

In [14]: [link.attrib['href'] for dom in doms for link in dom.cssselect("#storyBody a")]
Out[14]:

In [15]: categs=_

In [16]: len(categs)
Out[16]: 389

Finding the title, winner and runner-up

Next, open any url from the categs list and find CSS selectors for our items of interest. These three items are: award category title, winner and runner-up. Since cssselect function returns a list (even if only one match is found) we need to extract the 0-th element. Another function called text_content is applied to get just the information we are looking for.

In [17]: categ = categs[0]

In [18]: dom=get_page(categ)

In [19]: dom.cssselect("h1.headline")[0].text_content()
Out[19]: u'Best longtime cause worth fighting for\xa0'

In [20]: dom.cssselect(".boc1")[0].text_content()
Out[20]: 'Public school reform'

In [21]: dom.cssselect(".boc2")[0].text_content()
Out[21]: 'Recycling in Chicago'

Named Tuples - Ideal data structures for scraped input

Earlier, tuples were used for storing scrapped results. They use less memory compared to dictionaries. Recently, Python has support for named tuples which are much clearer to use and just as memory efficient.

The next few commands loops through all the award categories and adds a named tuple for each. To avoid fetching too many pages, I have truncated the list to only the first two items.

In [22]: from collections import namedtuple

In [23]: Award = namedtuple("Award", "title, winner, runnerup")

In [24]: awards = []

In [25]: for categ in categs[:2]:
             dom=get_page(categ)
             title = dom.cssselect("h1.headline")[0].text_content()
             winner = dom.cssselect(".boc1")[0].text_content()
             runnerup = dom.cssselect(".boc2")[0].text_content()
             a = Award(title=title, winner=winner, runnerup=runnerup)
             awards.append(a)

In [36]: awards
Out[36]:
[Award(title=u'Best longtime cause worth fighting for\xa0', winner='Public school reform', runnerup='Recycling in Chicago'),
 Award(title=u'Best historic building\xa0', winner='Chicago Cultural Center', runnerup='The Rookery')]

Power of Interactivity

For one-time scraping scripts, it is often best to use just the Python interpreter. I have tried to walk you through how I would attack the problem of scraping a set of web pages. Hope you found it useful!

Source:http://arunrocks.com/easy-practical-web-scraping-in-python/

Data Scraping Services Become Famous In The World As Business

Scrapping also called screen scrapers aside a specific web site to web sites using the latest tools for extracting information from the process. Website dismantling of automated scripts or programs that are written using Java, Perl, Python, is using such programming languages, etc. together a website, without any manual intervention automated tools to access web information to the control solution.

Web Scrapper for people to manually copy and paste information from thousands of websites is designed to find boring. Web Scraper can target users of information scrap and MySQL, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, etc., such as the different formats, to allow the export of

Web pages are structured to unstructured content into a Web Scrapper can help. Scrapper on the product information site, information, online shopping, news, press releases, contact information, stock quotes and other financial information may be useful to remove.

Web scraper companies, job portals, e – commerce web sites, directories, search engines and shopping sites, or information gathering of the material. Web scraper to help save many hours a person dedicated to data extraction itself and will dramatically reduce the time required.

Web Scraper using advanced Internet search algorithms to extract data from web pages, you can solve this problem.

Web Scrapper only software program that will crawl through the web and unstructured data from web pages and collect the required format and exported to the job of your choice. Web scraper Technical view by typing a URL to visit website after website and information on the Internet as a man. Web scraper data using advanced algorithms that are applied to PHP, Perl, Python, etc. This makes the programming languages by using the tracking

the measure of a website’s web pages to your local hard disk is useful for extracting information. Scrapper is a graphical user interface that you have a web URL (Uniform Resource Locator) allows you to create, delete data and is scrolling off the tracking algorithm is used to delete data.

Commercial customers for their products and offer you the world in the proposals to be sent to the email address you can use online promotion. Scrappers search engine spiders the web works similarly, but more powerful than you, and we obtain the desired output format, we can.

 Web Scrapper at regular intervals using a scraper can be used with web data to your spreadsheet; you can download an online database. Web scraper to collect a large amount of information can be informal and useful information, formatting them into the analysis purposes.

Web Scrappers various sectors of business are used in various purposes such as track creation, marketing, market analysis, strategy setting, based on the analysis of foreign exchange, stock quotes, product prices, etc. The information is collected using a web scrapper; your business can obtain information on the Internet.

Web scraper public information websites, email addresses for marketing purposes that can be used to create a large mailing list can be tracked. Commercial customers for their products and offer you the world in the proposals to be sent to the email address you can use online promotion. Scrappers search engine spiders the web works similarly, but more powerful than you, and we obtain the desired output format, we can.

Source:http://www.platforms.net/data-scraping-services-become-famous-in-the-world-as-business/