Author Archives: Luke Bacon

Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 5, saving your data & running it on morph.io

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the last post we dealt with the site’s pagination and started scraping […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 4, dealing with pagination

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the last post we finished collecting the data we want but discovered […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 3, continue writing your scraper

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the last post we started writing our scraper and gathering some data. […]

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Who comments in PlanningAlerts and how could it work better?

In our last two quarterly planning posts (see Q3 2015 and Q4 2015), we’ve talked about helping people write to their elected local councillors about planning applications through PlanningAlerts. As Matthew wrote in June, “The aim is to strengthen the connection between citizens and local councillors around one of the most important things that local […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 2, start writing your scraper

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the past post we set up our scraper. Now we’re going to […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 1, setting up your scraper

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials.   With just a few lines of code, you can write a scraper […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, September 2015

Welcome to the eighth edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. As always we’d love to see you at the OpenAustralia Foundation Sydney Pub Meet next Tuesday if you’re in town. Come along and give a lightning talk about something interesting in […]

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A massive week for They Vote For You

Forget what politicians say. What truly matters is what they do. And what they do is vote, to write our laws which affect us all. — They Vote For You Australia got a new Prime Minister last week. As the media detailed the step by step drama, tens of thousands of people visited and shared […]

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Web scraping workshop success—we’re doing it again in October!

Earlier this month we ran our first Introduction to Web Scraping Workshop and it was a big success! We had 6 wonderful attendees. By the afternoon everyone had written a scraper to collect data from the web. You can read more about how it went on information graphics designer Kelly Tall’s blog. We’re looking forward […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, August 2015

Welcome to the seventh edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. It seems like August has been a busy month for civic hackers everywhere because this month we’ve got a bunch of new projects from around the world for you. As always […]

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