Field notes from the world of data extraction.
Articles, interviews and analysis on how data is gathered, used and fought over — written by the people closest to it.
Podcast Episode 10 is out: Skills, packages & updates
Episode 10 of the Zyte podcast is out, and it is one of the widest-ranging conversations we have recorded this year. John Rooney sits down with Neha Setia Nagpal and Ayan Pahwa for an unfiltered, all-in-style chat covering everything the team has been building, reading, and arguing about lately.
Chrome has a new potential fingerprint vector
navigator.cpuPerformance is coming to Chrome in August, v152. What does it mean for fingerprinting and will it mean changes to scraping stacks?
Harness Engineering, part 4: giving your agent a custom fetch tool that survives the real web
Your AI agent is as powerful as the tools it has access to. Here's a tutorial on how you can create your own custom agent tool using Claude Agent SDK for zyte which makes getting structured data from web a breeze.
Meet scrapy-spidey-sense: A preflight check for Scrapy spiders
`scrapy-spidey-sense` is an open-source command-line interface (CLI) that checks a Scrapy project before the crawl begins. It performs local, static analysis, reports the production-readiness basics that are present or missing, assigns a score, and connects each finding to a practical fix or relevant documentation
Rendering Javascript pages without giving up Scrapy
How to render dynamic content and work with a browser through playwright and scrapy.
Spider monitoring made easy
How do you know you're collecting all the data you need? And how can you be sure it's actually what you were expecting? Use Spidermon.
I joined the Real Python podcast to talk harnesses and Scrapy
I was recently a guest on the Real Python podcast where host Christopher Bailey opened with the question that has been following me around all year: which matters more, the model or the harness around it? Let's look into it.
Building maintainable spiders with scrapy-poet
Separating your extract and parsing logic out help increase the maintainability and extensibility of your projects, and scrapy-poet makes it easy.
Modern Scrapy for experienced developers: A new series
How to create production ready Scrapy projects to scrape the modern web. In this article we start the process of creating our spider, look at settings, and build a pipeline to help keep our data quality high.
A guide to Scrapy item types
Scrapy supports multiple item types, but which should you use, and why.
New Zyte add-ons: Agent Skills, Codex, GitHub and more updates
A host of additions to Zyte’s agentic scraping toolbelt helps developers go from prompt to working spider code and beyond.
Podcast Ep08 - Scrapy, Python and mushroom soup
Scrapy's core handles crawling well and deliberately leaves almost everything else out: no bundled browser, no opinion about how you shape your data, no built-in answer for every anti-bot wrinkle. What it gives you instead is a clean way to add those things at the edges, exactly when you need them and never before.