Month: June 2008

One of the major challenges in web scraping is figuring out which page to scrape in the first place. Here’s a scenario: Say you need to pull some information for the film 30 Days of Night off IMDB. It would be great if you knew in advance what the URL was — something you could construct programatically — unfortunately, it’s actually http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389722/. How can you possibly figure that out? One solution would be to scrape IMDB’s built-in search feature and from there extract the correct URL. For IMDB, that works, but what about a site that doesn’t have a search …

Read more

I don’t know how I ever missed this Apple Mail plugin, but you absolutely have to give MsgFiler a try if you’re a heavy keyboard user. It lets you move messages into any folder in your mailbox using only the keyboard. Press ⌘9 to pull up a TextMate-like list of your mailbox folders. Then, select a folder by typing the first few letters in its name and move the currently selected message(s) into it with ↩. You can also jump to a folder with ⌘O instead of ↩. Awesome.

Today I’m proud to announce the release of two new open source projects: Appcaster and OpenFeedback. I’ve been working on them off and on for over nine months, so I’m very excited to finally see them out the door. Appcaster, which I’ve written about before, is a web-based dashboard for indie Mac developers. It’s designed to manage payment and order processing and generate license files for your users. It even handles your product’s revision history in Amazon S3 and can produce reports from your users’ demographic info. It also serves as a central location to collect user feedback, bug reports, …

Read more