Web Scraping with Firefox and PHP, using XPath

Last year, I faced two projects which required automated Web scrapping – to aggregate content from web pages. I evaluated different methods for Web scraping with varied level of success. Thanks to the changing structure of Web pages, non well-formed pages and URL redirects.

Amongst using regular expressions and DOM (Document Object Model) parsing, I used XPath too. XPath works great for well-formed Web pages. Read the rest of this entry »

Firefox 3.5 (Final) on Fedora 11

Firefox 3.5, the final release, has made its debut and is ready for download from here. Typically (and unfortunately) it may take about a day or two for Firefox 3.5 final to appear in the Fedora 11 repositories and across all the mirrors. When it appears, upgrading from the current version (Beta 4) of FireFox to the final release would be a matter of issuing ‘yum install firefox’. But we may not have to wait! Read the rest of this entry »

Chromified Firefox

In a half an hour attempt to make Firefox look like Google Chrome with some similar functionality, I achieved the following:

Fennec – Firefox for mobiles

We love Firefox on our desktops and now there is Firefox for our mobiles – called Fennec. Fennec is a web browser for mobiles (phones, PDAs and small screen tablets) released by Mozilla. As of this writing, it is in Alpha 1.

Fennec Alpha 1 is available only for Nokia N810 tablets running Maemo. But I own a Windows Mobile. Fortunately, Fennec is downloadable for Windows, Linux and Mac desktops – for users (like me) to see its glimpse, test it and give feedback.

I downloaded the Linux version from here. Extracted the archive (tar -jxvf fennec-1.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2). This produced a directory named fennec.  Changed to this directory and launched Fennec by issuing ./fennec.

Fennec - The first launch

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Slice out my latest post

The second beta of the upcoming version  of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE 8 ) web browser was released last month. One of the touted features of IE 8 is Web Slices.

Many of us cut out articles from the newspapers if we find them interesting. Think of Web Slices to be cuttings from Web sites. But with a difference. If these cuttings (web content) are updated on the respective web sites, you will be notified, as well as your cuttings will be updated. Technically, you “subscribe to a Web Slice”, instead of saying cutting it off which may offend the webmasters

The latest post on my Blog is Web Slice enabled (or say, it is a Web Slice). In fact, it is Web Slice enabled since some time. Perhaps, some of you (who are using IE 8 ) would have noticed it.

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