Author Profile
Ștefan Răcilă
Full Stack Developer
Stefan Racila is a DevOps and Full Stack Engineer at WebScrapingAPI, building product features and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the platform reliable.
Published Articles
12
Scrapy Splash Tutorial: Render JavaScript Pages
TL;DR: Scrapy Splash pairs Scrapy's fast crawling engine with the Splash headless browser to render JavaScript-heavy pages. This scrapy splash tutorial walks you through Docker setup, Scrapy project configuration, SplashRequest basics, Lua scripts for scrolling and clicking, proxy integration, and fixing the most common errors you will encounter.
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Top 11 Tips to Avoid Getting Blocked or IP Banned When Web Scraping
Master web scraping without getting blocked! Follow tips on respecting TOS, using proxies, and avoiding IP bans. Extract data ethically & legally.
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How to Use Proxies with Python Requests: From Basic to Production
TL;DR: This guide walks through how to use proxies with Python Requests end to end: a working proxies dict, authenticated URLs, environment variables, Session reuse, SOCKS5 with no DNS leaks, and a rotation pool with retries and a circuit breaker. By the end, you will know when a managed API earns its keep over a DIY pool.
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How To Make a Web Crawler Using Python - Beginner's Guide
This tutorial will demonstrate how to crawl the web using Python. Web crawling is a powerful approach for collecting data from the web by locating all of the URLs for one or more domains.
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What Is Browser Automation? A Practical Guide
TL;DR: Browser automation is the practice of driving a real or headless web browser from code so it clicks, types, navigates, and reads pages on your behalf. This guide explains what is browser automation under the hood, compares Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer, and Cypress, and shows when not to reach for a full browser.
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Web Scraping vs Data Mining: Differences, Pipelines, and When to Use Each
TL;DR: Web scraping collects raw data from public web pages. Data mining analyzes structured data to surface patterns, predictions, and segments. They are different stages of the same lifecycle, and most production systems combine them in a scrape-then-normalize-then-mine pipeline.
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Best Web Scraping Courses for Developers
TL;DR: The best web scraping courses depend on your language, level, and target use case. This guide compares five paid picks across Udemy, Coursera, DataCamp, and Packt, points to free supplements like official docs, and shows how to bridge from finishing a course to running production scrapers.
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Top 11 Tips to Avoid Getting Blocked or IP Banned When Web Scraping
With these 11 top recommendations, you'll learn how to web scrape without getting blacklisted. There will be no more error messages!
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CSS Selectors Cheat Sheet - How to scrape the web tips and tricks
Use this CSS Selectors Cheat Sheet when you want to scrape the web like a pro
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How and Why to Scrape Websites: The Ultimate guide
Find out everything related to recycling of shredded paper waste. From why to shred paper and how to recycle it.
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Top 8 Alternatives to Import.io for Data Scraping (2023 Edition)
Import.io tool works well, and firms use it to scrape eCommerce web data. But, if its drawbacks turn you off, here are eight best alternatives to import.io.
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Top 7 ProxyScrape Alternatives: Your Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping
A precise comparison of the Top 7 ProxyScrape alternatives out there and which Web Scraper came out on top!
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