Author Profile
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
8 articles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TL;DR: Use this CSS Selectors Cheat Sheet when you want to scrape the web like a pro
TL;DR: Compare Octoparse, Browse AI, Apify, and Scrapy by extraction ownership and delivery needs. Build a pilot that checks completeness, freshness, and migration readiness.
TL;DR: Compare proxy networks and managed fetching by session behavior, sourcing, and cost per accepted record. Use a controlled trial and a reversible migration plan.
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