

Show HN: Turn any website into an API HackMIT 2013 - danysantiago
http://ec2-54-211-79-18.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080/
Select anything on a website. If it is part of a table or a list, you get a URL which you can GET for a JSON representation of that list or table. Basically we are making an API for every website whether they like it or not.
======
diziet
Surely you are better off doing this locally rather than sending the data to
your aws server?

~~~
hack37
Source code is available.

See chrome_extension/background.js.

Change post url accordingly.

------
caffeinetocode
Nice! Just got the back end up and running on my OSX machine.pointed the
chrome plugin to my localhost. works like charm.

Though this looks similar to eBay's ql.io(open source) , I feel this is much
simpler.

------
justhw
Tried to run your extension, but kept getting error. Really neat idea, a
beginning of something big.
[http://imgur.com/slvRZOT](http://imgur.com/slvRZOT)

------
danpalmer
This is cool, Import.io started doing a similar thing too a few years ago:
[http://import.io/](http://import.io/).

------
sbruchmann
So, what’s the advantage over YQL?
[http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/](http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/)

~~~
moneyrich4
it looks like yql is only for some sites and you need the sites api key, and
this is any site "whether they like it or not" and it takes 2 clicks.

cool project thought about doing this myself, gl!.

~~~
sbruchmann
No, you can use YQL for any site that you want and even combine multiple
queries into a single one. I don’t see any reasons why this project needs to
exist…

------
drakaal
"whether they like it or not"

Basically they admit that this is a scraping tool for doing things you
shouldn't.

Companies that want to sell you data do. Companies that provide data for free
to use how you like do. This is basically automating stealing.

I have really low moral standards but I can see the wrongness of this.

~~~
icebraining
_I haven 't read the page, but from the title, I assume it's a scraper_

Sure, it can be used for copying data without permission. But not all data is
hard to read because they don't want you to copy it. For example, I've built a
scraper for a state-run website of company registrations. The data is public,
just not in a machine readable format.

------
gailees
This is awesome.

------
tweeeyjg
What was it like? I saw on the HackMIT website that firearms and weapons
weren't allowed.

