News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping by cdr on Wednesday April 20, 2011 @01:01AM (#2465314)
I have under a page of code with Scrapy for simple projects, and more advanced features when I need them.

That's like saying "jQuery is overkill for just about everything, you should use plain javascript".

Re:An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping by krakensden on Thursday April 21, 2011 @10:31AM (#2470729)
No, it's like saying "The full YUI suite is overkill for just about everything, you should just use the core or jQuery".

'scrapy startproject' creates a couple nested directories, with maybe seven files. Are you writing a scraper that you're going to run regularly? Does it need to be super robust and maintainable? Or are you writing something that you'll run once, maybe twice?

Re:An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping by cdr on Thursday April 28, 2011 @10:06PM (#2496064)
I seem to be missing why you think using a framework is a bad thing. With say django or YUI there are performance and abstraction issues that can bite you, but I don't see those mattering for so lightweight a framework and tightly scoped a problem.