The Data, The Scraper, The Tweeter and The Bot

Here’s a little experiment in using data for news:

Coding Update – get the data out there

Just to let you know that the Twitter account @Scrape_No10 which tweets out ministers’, special advisers’ and permanent secretaries’ meetings, gifts and hospitalities is back up and tweeting. You can read the post about its creation here and download all the data the account contains. This account needs more coding maintenance than the @OJCstatements account [...]

Telling a Story through Code: A Tale of Two Hamsters

This is Cuddles. He’s a Russian Dwarf hamster. We have 2 males. Cuddles is the beta male. He was fat and lazy which made him very docile. You’d like Cuddles. He’s a good little hamster. He’s been made docile by the fact that he’s bullied by the alpha male. We initially called the alpha male [...]

Ode to a Piece of Code

Here is my first piece of Python code (that isn’t messing about in my command line). Well, it’s the first piece that does something with something on the web. That thing being the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Seeing as his works now come in the html edition, all the words he ever writ is now [...]

Snake Charming – coding for plebs

The web has two faces. One it shows to programmers, the other to us mere mortals. As a source, the face it shows to programmers is so much more revealing. In this way, I’m trying first to understand the language of the web before I can scrape it. Now scraping is a lot harder than [...]

Coding for those who don’t know what coding is

I have gone dark on the data journalism front and I apologize. It’s just that work that actually pays me has picked up! But I have not dropped the baton and indeed, my latest finding have reignited my flame for all things data driven. So please do join me on my data journey. I am [...]