A year ago, web scraping was still a foreign concept to me. How could I possibly automate logging into a site, navigating to a target, and extracting the required data, especially if the site relied on JavaScript for key parts of the interaction or DOM manipulation??? Fortunately, Nightmare, a simple, straightforward Node.js wrapper around PhantomJS, takes all of the horror out of this. This post will cover how to get started with Nightmare and some tricks to get some real mileage out of it.
When you want to be able to deploy interesting web projects alongside a blog with a unified and personal theme, using a CMS or blog engine stops becoming an option. Maybe you just don't want to deal with all of the concerns of hosting, securing, and updating WordPress on your own. Or maybe you want to be able to serve lots of visitors quickly on slim hardware. If any of these sounds like you, it is time to look at static site generators, such as Metalsmith. This post covers how to get started building a basic blog with Metalsmith.