3 ms·
I'm not in the pirate archivist space, but sections 3 and 5 are relevant to my interests. I've had great luck with ZAP (https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy#readm
by mdaniel 4y ago
I'm not in the pirate archivist space, but sections 3 and 5 are relevant to my interests. I've had great luck with ZAP (https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy#readme https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy#readme) glued to a copy of Firefox (because it allows monkeying with the _browser_'s proxy without having to alter the system one as other browsers do) for archiving all content seen while surfing around a site. It even achieves the stated goal of preserving the HTML (etc) in a database since ZAP uses hsqldb
Then, section 5 reads like an advertisement for Scrapy since it is just stellar at following all pagination links and then either emitting the extracted payload as your own data structure and/or by telling Scrapy you want to download some media as-is. It will, by default, put the local content in a directory of your choice and hash the url to make the local filename. A separate json file serves as the "accounting" between the things it downloaded and their hashed on-disk filename
Scrapy is also able to glue 3 and 5 together because it has a pluggable (everything, heh) dupe detection hook and also HTTP cache support that can be backed by anything, including the aforementioned hsqldb operating in network mode. Scrapy is also very test friendly, since each method accepts a well known python object and emits either a follow-on request, zero or more extracted objects, or nothing if pagination has ended. Thus, one need not rerun the whole scraping process just to test if a bug has been fixed, or during development
I can appreciate there may be other scraping frameworks, but of the ones I've tried Scrapy makes everything that I've asked it to do simple and transparent
- genewitch 4y agoThis is extremely relevant to my interests. I will try ZAP with a VM that has the explicit purpose of mirroring all content i view "online" within that VM. there's the web archival projects - that i cannot remember right now - that have some sort of proxy front end, but realistically, it should be possible to record the "content" portion of all web interactions, without relying on such dalliances as OCR and screengrabs or even OBS studio or a screen recorder. Sometimes i go on a deep dive of some concept, and when i am done i feel i have a decent enough understanding to explain the concept to an adult, and sometimes i do a deep enough dive to explain to a 6 year old. I'd like to archive the entire "session" that got me there. Ideally as plaintext, but never have i wanted video documentation. I only ever use video to prove to someone that their service is acting up, since audio/visual desktop captures can do that, without cheating and provably.