Author Archives: Zarino Zappia

About Zarino Zappia

VP of Product at ScraperWiki, Zarino makes decisions about what the site should do and how it does them. He has a background in Communications, Cultural Studies, and UX design, with degrees from Goldsmiths, London and the Oxford Internet Institute.

Free community accounts on the ScraperWiki Beta

Posted on May 10, 2013

We’ve been teasing and tempting you with blog posts about the first few tools on the new ScraperWiki Beta for a while now. It’s time to let you try them out first-hand. As of right now, the new ScraperWiki Beta … Continue reading →

Posted in developer, news | Tagged | 7 Comments

From future import x.scraperwiki.com

Posted on March 19, 2013

Time flies when you’re building a platform. At the start of the year, we announced the beginnings of a new, more powerful, more flexible ScraperWiki. More powerful because it exposes industry standards like SQL, SSH, and a persistent filesystem to … Continue reading →

Posted in developer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

The next evolution of ScraperWiki

Posted on December 21, 2012

Quietly, over the last few months, we’ve been rebuilding both the backend and the frontend of ScraperWiki. The new ScraperWiki has been built from the ground up to be more powerful for data scientists, and easier to use for everyone … Continue reading →

Posted in developer | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

The state of Twitter: Mitt Romney and Indonesian Politics

Posted on July 23, 2012

It’s no secret that a lot of people use ScraperWiki to search the Twitter API or download their own timelines. Our “basic_twitter_scraper” is a great starting point for anyone interested in writing code that makes data do stuff across the … Continue reading →

Posted in developer | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Software Archaeology and the ScraperWiki Data Challenge at #europython

Posted on June 29, 2012

There’s a term in technical circles called “software archaeology” – it’s when you spend time studying and reverse-engineering badly documented code, to make it work, or make it better. Scraper writing involves a lot of this stuff. ScraperWiki’s data scientists … Continue reading →

Posted in developer, events, opendata | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Scraping the protests with Goldsmiths

Posted on December 9, 2011

Zarino here, writing from carriage A of the 10:07 London-to-Liverpool (the wonders of the Internet!). While our new First Engineer, drj, has been getting to grips with lots of the under-the-hood changes which’ll make ScraperWiki a lot faster and more … Continue reading →

Posted in developer, events, journalism | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

ScraperWiki scrapers: now 53% more useful!

Posted on November 16, 2011

It’s Christmas come early at ScraperWiki HQ as we deliver—like elves popping boxes under the data digging Christmas tree—a bunch of great new improvements to the ScraperWiki site. We’ve been working on these for a while, so it’s great to … Continue reading →

Posted in developer, news, Scrapers | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Hi, my name’s Zarino

Posted on October 7, 2011

So when Nicola asked me to write a Friday post introducing myself on the ScraperWiki blog, I never thought I’d be writing it during such a momentous few days. I was meant to entertain and beguile you with talk of my … Continue reading →

Posted in users | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments