Three-in-one: looking for advice on Turdpress, Ocular Discharge, and screen (sc)raping
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I have a close friend, B, who has three different issues which has asked for my help with. While he knows a lot about both programming and hardware, he's short on both time and money; has worked in IT in the past, but he managed to raise enough funds to move on the Greener Pastures in the form of film and game production. While he is not the main backer of these projects, he has put a sizable purse into each, and did most of the leg work in raising funds and finding investors, as well a lot of the cat herding on and off set (more with the directors and editors than with the actors, surprisingly enough).
I suspect that the funds do exist, and that he just is trying to help me out of my rut with some work therapy, but whatever.
The first problem is spec'ing out a low-profile, small footprint development workstation that is beefy enough for Oculus Rift dev, without going over $5K if possible. I've found several small pizzabox and cube customizer systems that fit his requirements, and started to find out about options for a custom OTS build, but that sort of got sidetracked.
The second is getting the schedules for upcoming film festivals off of this website (EDIT: oops, pasted the wrong link, now it should be going to the TheTakes website it's actually on). I assume this will mean scraping the page, but I've been meaning to contact the site owners to see if they expose a webservice - no point in doing unnecessary work - though I expect their reply will be, "what's a webservice?" So chances are I will need to either find a tool that automates that, or break out the documentation for Beautiful Soup and do it myself.
But the one that is most pressing is the website for their latest production. He originally asked me to build it, spring of last year, but I told him I was in no condition mentally to do it and he eventually borke down and found someone who claimed to be a Wordpress expert (the production company already had a WP based site and he wanted to keep things simple). This claim proved to be a baldfaced lie, and now B needs me (well, someone, he just is hoping he can get my mind off of things by having me do it) to figure out why the Fanart Uploader plug-in looks like shit, among other things. So I will need to dig into how Turdpress plug-ins work and determine if this particular one has some parameters for controlling the layout.
I will be working on finding this last one today, but if anyone can give me any links or pointers to find the answers I need, I would be ever so grateful.
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If there isn't a web service that can be found easily by googling, just scrape it.
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@lucas1 said in Three-in-one: looking for advice on Turdpress, Ocular Discharge, and screen (sc)raping:
If there isn't a web service that can be found easily by googling, just scrape it.
+1 scraping is super easy, if the markup is reasonably consistent.
