📅 2024-05-21 — Session: Developed and Optimized Educational Website Crawler
🕒 18:20–19:50
🏷️ Labels: Web Scraping, Scrapy, Python, Crawler, Optimization, Education
📂 Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM
Session Goal
The goal of this session was to develop a web crawler for an educational institution’s website using Scrapy, focusing on internal links and optimizing its performance.
Key Activities
- Guideline Creation: Developed detailed instructions for creating a web crawler using Scrapy, organizing link networks with NetworkX, and extracting specific information with BeautifulSoup.
- Project Planning: Planned the crawler project to systematically detect and organize all linked pages from the main faculty page, limiting exploration to 4 levels deep.
- Crawler Configuration: Configured the crawler to perform depth-limited searches and visualize link networks.
- Log Analysis: Analyzed Scrapy crawler logs to assess exploration depth, download statistics, duplicate handling, memory usage, and errors.
- BFS Implementation: Adjusted Scrapy settings to implement a breadth-first search (BFS) approach.
- URL Filtering Optimization: Enhanced the crawler to filter irrelevant URLs, improving data quality.
- Connection Error Solutions: Diagnosed and addressed connection errors related to
robots.txt, including timeout adjustments and middleware configurations.
Achievements
- Successfully developed a crawler capable of exploring educational websites with improved link filtering and error handling.
Pending Tasks
- Further optimization of the crawler’s performance and error handling strategies may be needed as more data is collected and analyzed.