So glad to be here

[ScrapingLab]

I'm not new to the IM scene but I have to say this forum, although small, differs greatly on kind of people that post here. I definetely see a lot more professionalism compared to sites like BHW that has turned into "follow me on my spamming porn/instagram + og ads" journeys with a bunch of wanna be trollers lol.

I actually stumbled upon this website by this thread:
https://www.buildersociety.com/thre...crapist-the-scrapy-framework-for-python.1771/
Really nice staring thread for introducing newbies to the Scrapy framework!

I'm a python programmer and am becoming a Scrapy expert along the way(it happens when you start coding in Scrapy every day for weeks doing small to medium freelance orders).

My goal is to eventually start posting more posts in the DevOps section, which is the section I'm highly interested on from this forum, and possibly create a journey thread about my goal of expanding my scraping brand: ScrapingLab.

Essentially , I'm starting hustling Scrapy gigs on fiverr.com, and in the future I will start adding Scrapy tutorials on posted here then on my blog, and down the road I do wish to develop some udemy/teachable python scraping courses to expand from freelancing to digital courses.

The only person I recognize here is @CCarter from WF, and old forum where I first opened my account back in 2008.

Thanks for having me here guys!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Very happy to have another scrape artist on board. @turbin3 is the poster of that thread you mentioned. With your powers combined, I feel sorry for the internet!

I know there are a lot of people from older forums on board here that have chosen to burn old aliases and start fresh. We're kind of like the island on the show LOST. Everyone gets a fresh start before their lives are completely changed by the island.

DevOps is also among my favorite sections here. I'm glad to hear you'll drop some knowledge on us there.

There are lots of other sites beyond Fiverr, like Upwork, where you could probably find clients with bigger budgets and less headaches.

Anyways, catch you around the forum.

 

[turbin3]

Thanks for the kind words ScrapingLab and Ryuzaki. Glad to have you here!

Here's something I've thought about for quite awhile, and I just thought I'd mention in case it sparks any content ideas for you. A couple of things I've found that seem to have been very beneficial for a lot of people, and particularly students / junior programmers, is learning to diagnose code issues and failures. This is where I particularly like Python, in that you can usually just search the failure message, open 2 or 3 Stackoverflow threads, and you usually end up with a relatively copy/pasta solution. ;-) Teaching people to self-diagnose code problems can seriously accelerate their learning, in my experience. So any insights you have there would be valuable.

The second idea has to do with helping people grasp the mental process involved. Say you're writing a program, or coding a bot for some particular scraping purpose. Where do you start? What are the primary things you look at? How do you try to break down the process? How do you learn to answer your own questions. Any insights on the mental side of the process can potentially help accelerate beginners towards becoming critical thinkers.

See, I think that's one of the areas BuSo differs quite a bit from some of the other communities I've been in. There seems to be much more of an atmosphere here towards fostering a critical thinking mindset as opposed to simply creating followers. It is a force multiplier, to be sure. A fantastic example of that is the BuSo Digital Strategy Crash Course, of which there is literally nothing else like it on any other community I've seen or been a part of.

 

[ScrapingLab]

There are lots of other sites beyond Fiverr, like Upwork, where you could probably find clients with bigger budgets and less headaches.

Anyways, catch you around the forum.

Oh man, I already have a history with Upwork also known as oDesk when I first joined. In fact, that is where I first got my first scraping contracts back in the summer of 2013. I closed my account on May of this year after the whole raising fees that made me mad on top of my Success Score freaking dropping.

The thing is, there are differences on Upwork vs Fiverr for scraping jobs. First of all, on Upwork you literally chase the clients by sending detail proposals on jobs that I would only apply to if they had a minimum 150-300 ish budget. And most of my jobs were in the range of 300-500 and 1 lengthy one of 1100. On top of that, your success score does not depend on simple 1-5 stars like fiverr, they depend on a lengthy of other things you can't control.

Such as if the client didn't leave a comment on the feedback, then it will hurt your score. Also, if the client gave you the contract and then cancelled it before paying anything, then your score will hurt more than if you closed 2-3 good contracts.

Then, applying at Upwork jobs without having any other money or secure little jobs make you thirsty as fuck, excuse my french, but I have noticed the difference drastically. Just recently, I opened a second account and it has no work history so it is completely new and I only login into it once every 2 weeks, to see of any open Scrapy projects. The effort I put into sending proposals is nothing compared to what I used to do in the past. Now all I need to is like 2 proposals at most and get like at least 1 reply back because I do not sound thirsty as I used to anymore.

The reason is because on fiverr, the clients look for you based if your gig enticed them to send you a message. With fiverr is really all about knowing how to deal with clients for smaller jobs but quicker.It makes me get out of my comfort zone and hold my craft to a higher standard because I have learned from the small amount of clients I've been dealing on fiverr to not under sell yourself. I'm not doing $5 dollar gigs at all, although my average price per job is low, am doing little custom scraping jobs for anywhere from 40-110 per order, sometimes like less if its a quick fix or upgrade on a current Scrapy spider.
Just my last 3 orders averaged twice as much as my current average per order.So I feel like am learning and earning very slow and steady though.


There is also a lot less competition on people offering Scrapy spiders or scrapers, in fact, I'm the only one showing on the search results for the term "Scrapy", and there are only a handful of established scrapers on fiverr offering scraping gigs(None of their gigs start at $5 though).

My goal is to get established there , amass the revenue from the small constant jobs so I can invest it into other revenues.

Scraping is literally my go to money activity when I need to make money online, it is kinda the only thing I know how to do well and fast. In the future am trying to start offering Django services too but I need to play with it more though.