Hi GuysI have a website that provides opportunities to school leavers and unemployed youth, it's such a long drag manually entering course infomration from local colleges and universities. Is there a way of scrapping this course information from a college website i.e. http://www.ystrad-mynach.ac.uk/ and input it efficiently into my website?Any information would be much appreciatedThanks
hire a coder that can create a script for you that will pull your desired content. There can also be legal concerns pulling content without their permission...
Thank you for the reply, Another question im afraid, is this a big job, i'm thinking of freelancing it out, what would I expect? have been searching freelance sites for ideasThanks
Could it be done? Sure. How much? For a real programmer, or for someone in a hut who thinks that 100 Euros is a fortune and ripping people off is easy, since you're never going to find him physically? Figure (US dollars, since your freelancer can be anywhere and charge in any currency - just to give you an idea) around $50/hour and up, and anywhere from a week to a month for a real programmer, unless the sites you want to scrape have APIs that can be used to get the data. (For instance, to get the current weather for any location from Yahoo is trivial - maybe an hour to code including a nice looking page to display it on. To scrape Yahoo's site could take a day or more, and as soon as they change the layout of the site - this is a problem with any screen scrape - you have to change the code.) You'll probably get offers of $50 for the whole job on some freelance sites. What will you get for that? Maybe a page that does exactly what you want. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe something that does something, but not really what you want. If the programmer is in your legal jurisdiction (meaning in your country, usually), you both know that you have leverage if he just takes your money, so most people won't even be thinking about doing it. If he's closer, you can meet in person, discuss things, and you'll know if you have a meeting of the minds. (What I understand from an email may be nothing like what the person who wrote it had in mind.) A couple of quick sketches on napkins can clear up what you want and what he thinks you want. If you're offered a contract prior to any work, add a point to your confidence.