For the first Something For The Weekend of 2012 I want to tackle a common problem when you’re trying to scrape a collection of webpage: they have some sort of structure in their URL like this, where part of the URL refers to the name or code of an entity: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237521 http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237629 http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237823 In this instance, you can see that
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Quite often when you’re looking for data as part of a story, that data will not be on a single page, but on a series of pages. To manually copy the data from each one – or even scrape the data individually – would take time. Here I explain a way to use Google Docs to grab the data for
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CableSearch is a neat project by the European Centre for Computer Assisted Research and VVOJ (the Dutch-Flemish association for investigative journalists) which aims to make it easier for journalists to interrogate the Wikileaks cables. Although it’s been around for some time, I’ve only just noticed the site’s API, so I thought I’d show how such an API can be useful as a
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Here’s another Something for the Weekend post. Last week I wrote a post on how to use the =importFeed formula in Google Docs spreadsheets to pull an RSS feed (or part of one) into a spreadsheet, and split it into columns. Another formula which performs a similar function more powerfully is =importXML. There are at least 2 distinct journalistic uses
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It’s been over 2 years since I stopped doing the ‘Something for the Weekend’ series. I thought I would revive it with a tutorial on They Work For You and Google Refine… If you want to add political context to a spreadsheet – say you need to know what political parties a list of constituencies voted for, or the MPs
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Following on from the previous Something for the Weekend, Twickie, which allows you to collect responses to a question posted on Twitter, this tool allows you to present a conversation – with impressive control. QuoteURL allows you to drag and drop (or copy and paste) Twitter tweet URLs to reconstruct a conversation.
This week’s Something for the Weekend tool review continues the Twitter theme with a simple tool which helps bridge the Twitter-blog divide. If you’ve ever posted a question on Twitter and followed it up with a blog post discussing the responses, you’ll have probably been frustrated by the inability to present those responses in the blog post – you either have
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It’s been a while since I did a Something for the Weekend tool review, but Twitter bookmarking service TagThis is such a great tool it needed covering. TagThis allows you to bookmark any URL you see on Twitter to your own account on Delicious or Magnolia. This is particularly useful if, like me, you use Twitter on a mobile phone
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I’ve looked at a number of tools in this series, often very new with potential applications for journalism that haven’t been realised. This time I want to turn the spotlight onto tools that you’re using every day, which may not be flashy, but which do a simple job very well – for example: in managing or filtering information, identifying leads,
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