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Mar 23The View From Your State
by in Feature Articles on 2023-04-03April Fool's Day happened over the weekend, which means no April Fool's Day post. I mean, I could have, but instead, I thought it would be fun to look into something that, once upon a time, wasn't a WTF, but honestly, always should have been.
Our story starts with Jake, a relatively modern web developer, who was helping another developer, Jane, build a site-scraper for a local government's site. See, the government site couldn't be bothered with anything like RSS, so if you wanted a list of upcoming events, notifications, or other information, your only option was to load the page manually, or whip up a site-scraper that automated extracting that information.