Scrape the web with Goutte

A month ago’s adventures including building a web scraper. Working to a tight schedule, I poked around the tubes and decided to give Goutte a whirl. Goutte is a simple wrapper around Guzzle and a bunch of Symfony components (such as BrowserKit and DomCrawler). In theory this makes grabbing a webpage as simple as: use … Read more

Disable the JIRA reindex button

Atlassian’s issue tracker JIRA maintains file based indexes to make looking up issues faster. Certain changes (such as adding or changes custom fields) will make JIRA prompt administrators to rebuild these indexes. Unfortunately, this process makes JIRA inaccessible until it is complete (up to 20 minutes for a medium sized instance on version 5, less … Read more

Comment Spam Sucks

I have spent considerable time over the past week going through the backlog of unapproved comments on my blog (yes, which had one post until now). Somewhere upwards of 500 comments, every single one of them spam. Mostly drug related posts with the occasional fake designer shoes or handbags thrown in. Last time it was … Read more