We're in the middle of implementing a more power developer version of the tool to handle the use cases you're talking about. The beginning of this is surfaced under the "advanced" tab in the data model view where we show the selectors and regular expressions that are produced. we want to ultimately let you edit those to customize the extractor. From there it'd be super cool to implement the javascript snippet feature you suggested.
You've got a valid point. We want to eventually create a space that allows responsible scraping - so webmasters can have access to analytics on what's being scraped and can explicitly turn off kimono APIs for their domains if they see fit. We also think there are use cases for people who own their own data. Often, APIs will provide a way for companies to streamline their internal app development and figure out what to expose to the developer community before investing in an expensive API deployment.
Sorry you had a bad first experience. We've tested this on a lot of sites, and it works stably across a lot of different cases, but haven't solved it everywhere. Thanks for letting us know about the discussion page. We'll look into the bugs right now
Great request... it's on our feature shortlist. Definitely a feature we want to implement as soon as we can (after we tackle some basics like pagination and getting images)
Access, legality and rate limiting issues come up a lot. We're working on a couple things to address them. The first is an intelligent job distribution system that consolidates scrapes across users and hits sites (and pages) at human-like intervals. the second is to create a portal for webmasters that allows them special privileged access to analytics on data being extracted from their sites, and the ability to "turn on or off" kimono APIs if they see fit. this way, via kimono, a webmaster at chumby could "provision" certain kimono users. we're still yet to see whether the later works out. thanks for the input
thanks. glad you like it. pagination, dynamic tabs (and crawling in general) is a big feature we really want to add soon. a lot of people are asking for it. the challenge will be integrating it with the current UEX which we're trying to keep super simple.
Thanks... yes, public data from governments is a great use case. Often a lot of apps built using scrapers will wind up driving up traffic/ sales a the source site so it's okay. We want to do responsible web scraping, so will respect webmasters robots.txt files to make sure it's legal.
We don't support logging in yet, but it's a feature we're working on adding. Scripting will also be cool, but it's right now further down our feature queue
JS-heavy sites can be tricky. We position it so it should execute after most of the on-page JS, so it handles a lot of cases. There are still sites that break it though.... we're trying to tackle these guys one by one right now, as we try to generalize a broader solution
If it changes the format significantly, the scraper will break, so for now you'll have to use the tool to rebuild. You will see on your API status page that it's down. As for robots.txt, we do respect it... for now we're leaving that to the user, but we're trying to implement a proactive way of checking for disallows and stopping those scrapers from being built.