Author Archives: Francis Irving

Tools liberate your data from apps

Posted on May 22, 2013

An app is something that makes it easy for a user to achieve one thing. It’s an appliance. Like a washing machine. On the new ScraperWiki platform we talk a lot about tools. A tool is something you use with materials … Continue reading →

Posted in beta, thoughts | Leave a comment

Summarise #4: Images and domains

Posted on May 14, 2013

(This is the fourth part in a series of posts about the “Summarise this dataset” tool on the new beta.scraperwiki.com platform  – go there and sign up for free to try it out! The code is open source; take a … Continue reading →

Posted in beta | 1 Comment

Scheduling! Keep your data fresh

Posted on May 13, 2013

We’ve added scheduling to the “Code in your browser” tool on beta.scraperwiki.com. For now it is daily, as that covers most people’s uses. Please ask if you need something else! Or have a look at the tool’s source code. Want … Continue reading →

Posted in developer | 5 Comments

Summarise #3: Buckets of time and numbers

Posted on May 8, 2013

In the last two weeks I introduced the “Summarise automatically tool”, which magically shows you interesting facts about any dataset in the new ScraperWiki. It’s an open source tool – geeks can play along on Github, or use the SSH … Continue reading →

Posted in beta | 1 Comment

Internships – coding and data science

Posted on May 1, 2013

The last two summers, we had a really good intern (Aidan Hobson Sayers - thanks for finding him for us, John!). We’d like to do it again this year. We’ve opportunities in three areas, depending on your skills and interests. Platform team … Continue reading →

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Summarise #2: Pies and facts

Posted on April 29, 2013

In a previous blog post, I showed how by counting the most common values in each column (like a pivot table, or “group by” in SQL),  I managed to make a tool that can automatically summarise datasets. I quickly realised … Continue reading →

Posted in beta | 4 Comments

Summarise #1: Grouping automatically for you

Posted on April 12, 2013

Late at night, after a long conversation in a bar (after Social Media Cafe), Zach mentioned one feature that everyone loved about Kasabi. It had an overview page, which automatically summarised each dataset. Of course, Kasabi did it using linked … Continue reading →

Posted in beta, developer | 5 Comments

A small matter of programming

Posted on December 31, 2012

We’re rebuilding ScraperWiki. For three years, we’ve been helping people get, clean and analyse data on the web. Our key insight was that you need to write code to do that, and we should make writing that code as easy … Continue reading →

Posted in thoughts | 5 Comments

Job: Turn data into business!

Posted on December 17, 2012

Data has been used for business for centuries. For example, I came across this detailed book of tables made over 500 years ago in India. It’s the revenue in copper coins from the spring and autumn harvests. The book covers … Continue reading →

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Nurture community! A job at ScraperWiki

Posted on December 5, 2012

ScraperWiki has always been about community. The openness of making data do things, together. Things that matter, that lots of people care about. We’re pleased to announce that we’re hiring a full time Community Manager. If you’re interested in data … Continue reading →

Posted in jobs | 1 Comment