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Re:Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API by turtlebits on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @02:18PM (#21008325)
Very cool, but super slow, especially for an API point, which I would expect you could use directly from a front end.

Tested on a site I regularly visit

  dashblock (3 selectors, ~20 items):  16.911 seconds
  curl (no scraping):  60 ms
  chrome:  987 ms

edit: added chrome
Re:Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API by HPouillot on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @02:32PM (#21008468)
Indeed, we are rendering the whole page with the javascript, that's why it takes longer than a curl. For now, it's especially useful for dynamic pages but we also plan on supporting pages that don't require rendering.
Re:Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API by __ka on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @02:49PM (#21008630)
Maybe you already do it, but I think integrating adblocker functionality when loading JS sites would be desirable to reduce load time. And if ads are what the API user is interested in, perhaps add a flag for whether or not one wants ads to load.

Recommendation: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker Should be the fastest adblocker library (used by Ghostery, Cliqz and Brave)

Re:Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API by HPouillot on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @03:50PM (#21009296)
Thanks for the advice, it makes a lot of sense !
Re:Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API by turtlebits on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @03:09PM (#21008836)
Sounds good. It does make sense to check to see if your selectors work with raw HTML on publish to verify if you require JS or not.
Re:Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API by HPouillot on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @03:51PM (#21009304)
Yep, that's our plan :)