The term web scraping has come to stay. It refers to getting stuff off web sites in an automated fashion. Other terms occasionally used for include spidering, web harvesting and more. I’ve used the term HTTP scripting for it.

The art is in many cases to act more or less like a browser with the single purpose of making the server not detect that it is a program in the other end.

This is something I’ve done a lot over the years while developing curl, and I’ve answered countless of questions on the matter. There are several good books (all of them having at least parts of them covering curl).

Today, we’ve setup a little web site over at webscrapers.haxx.se and an associated mailing list, in an attempt to gather people who are working in this field. Whether you do it for fun or profit doesn’t matter and while we can certainly discuss what tools you should or shouldn’t use for scraping, we certainly don’t limit which to discuss on the list as long as the subject is somewhat relevant.

So, if you’re into scraping or you want to learn more on how to automate your web bots, come on over and join the list and let’s see where this might take us!