Building a Resilient Meta Ads Scraper: What Breaks (and What I Learned Fixing It)
When I set out to build a tool for pulling ad data from Meta's platforms, the brief I gave myself was deceptively simple: let someone search for ads b…
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Building an Instagram-powered app without managing scraping infrastructure
When I started building , I needed reliable access to Instagram data. Like many developers, my first instinct was to use a self-hosted solution such a…
How to Build a LinkedIn Profile Scraper: The Honest Technical Guide
If you have ever tried to build a LinkedIn profile scraper , you have probably discovered that the obvious path — "just call the API" — is a dead end.…
How We Optimized a Django Playwright Scraper to Save 60% on Rotating Proxy Bandwidth
As indie hackers and backend developers, we love using modern browser automation frameworks like Playwright to handle heavy, JavaScript-rendered dynam…
Building a Lean, Single-Worker Broken URL Monitor for Data Pipelines
The Technical Problem: Websites Drift, Pipelines Don't Know Long-running scraping pipelines have a structural assumption baked in: the URLs you config…
How to Scrape E-Commerce Sites for AI Agents Using Playwright and LLMs
TL;DR AI agents require structured JSON data (prices, specifications, availability), but modern e-commerce sites serve heavily obfuscated, JavaScript-…
How to Get Google Search Results in JSON for an AI Agent
So you’re building an AI agent. At first, everything feels simple. The user asks a question, the model thinks, and the agent returns an answer. Then y…
Your Scraper Collected 50 Rows. There Were 4,000.
A scraper can pass every check you wrote and still be wrong about the one thing you actually care about: how much it collected. No exception. No 500. …
Training a Twitch chat toxicity classifier on real VOD data at scale
Quick answer: Twitch has no public API for VOD chat replay. To build a Twitch toxicity classifier dataset you walk the internal VideoCommentsByOffsetO…
Your Scraper Died at Row 12,000. The Rerun Pattern.
My scraper died at row 12,000 of 50,000, three hours in. The crash itself was cheap. A process gets OOM-killed, a quota trips, a machine reboots, it h…
How to test whether your web extraction API is lying to your agent
The dangerous part of web extraction is not the error. The dangerous part is a clean JSON response that looks correct and is not. If an AI agent uses …
Cloudflare Turnstile in Playwright: Why Your Tests Stall and How to Solve It in 8 Lines
Cloudflare Turnstile in Playwright: Why Your Tests Stall and How to Solve It in 8 Lines If you're running Playwright or Selenium against any site behi…
Threads Reply Scraper: export the full conversation tree of any public post
Quick answer: Meta's official Threads API is gated behind a developer-account review and refuses third-party conversation reads. To export the full re…
LLM API pricing comparison: one schema across all 7 providers for $5.05/1K
Quick answer: There is no unified official API for LLM pricing. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Groq, Together AI, and DeepSeek each publish their…
The compiler caught a lot. It didn't catch enough.
I built a small web scraping framework in Rust, mostly with an AI doing the typing. It's called ferrous — a Colly-style collector: register CSS select…
The 7 Best Reddit Scrapers in 2026 (Free & Paid, Tested)
Looking for the best way to scrape Reddit posts and comments in 2026? Here's an honest, hands-on comparison of the top Reddit scrapers — including the…
I Tested Every Web Scraping Tool Against Lazada — Here's What Actually Works (May 2026)
I came across Scrapling through a recommendation on X and decided to put it through its paces — not against a demo page, but against Lazada Singapore,…
Why Your Requests + BeautifulSoup Stack Will Fail in Production
TL;DR — requests plus BeautifulSoup is the right tool for tutorials, side projects, and one-off audits. It is the wrong tool for any scraper that has …
Open-source Playwright wrapper that passes bot.sannysoft.com, pixelscan, and CreepJS in headless mode
Been scraping for a while and got tired of getting blocked the moment a page loads. Standard Playwright leaks everywhere — TLS fingerprint, navigator.…
# Building Instagram OSINT Projects with HikerAPI
I recently experimented with building an Instagram OSINT project on Linux using Python and HikerAPI. Originally I tried older scraping libraries and u…
What I learned scraping 141 crypto cardholder agreements
On 3 February 2026, three unrelated crypto cards — CEX.IO Card, Trustee Plus, and IN1 — stopped processing payments on the same day. They had no paren…
XCrawl vs Puppeteer vs Playwright: Which Web Scraping Tool Saves You More Time in 2026?
The Web Scraping Toolkit Spectrum Let's be real: there are dozens of ways to scrape the web. From raw curl to full-blow browser automation frameworks.…
How to Scrape JS-Rendered E-Commerce Pages Without Getting Blocked (2026 Guide)
The Problem E-commerce sites like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have moved to heavy JavaScript rendering. Traditional HTTP clients (curl, requests, fetc…
CrawlForge v4.2.2: New CLI + 3 Tools for Local AI Scraping
Today we are shipping CrawlForge v4.2.2 , our biggest release since launch. It brings three new tools, a standalone command-line interface, and a quie…
Stop Building Fragile Scrapers — Build Actors Instead
TL;DR — A "scraper" is a script that ran once. An "actor" is a unit of work with an input contract, an output schema, observability, and a billing mod…
6 Firecrawl Alternatives for Developers in 2026
Your pipeline scrapes 10,000 pages through Firecrawl. A third come back as failures—access blocks and challenges, empty responses from SPAs that loade…
Automating Web Intelligence with Python: A Practical Guide
Automating Web Intelligence with Python: A Practical Guide Web intelligence — the systematic extraction of actionable data from the web — sounds like …
What to do when websites change and your spider doesn't know
Empty-field-rate monitoring catches selectors that return nothing. It does not catch selectors that return something wrong. The most damaging form of …
Bypassing Akamai v3 sensor_data with TLS in 2026 — why the deobfuscator is a trap
I have spent the last two years staring at Akamai's bot manager. Specifically the _abck cookie, the bm_sz cookie, and the giant base64-looking string …
Build an MCP Server for Agentic Web Scraping and Real-Time LLM Grounding
Large Language Models (LLMs) operate in a vacuum. To build autonomous agents that perform market research, track public pricing across e-commerce site…