[aktlingit]

So I like the Organizer a lot, but having to open up each collection, click Print and such gets very tedious when you start having a large number of collections, which I do. Just printing my All Items collection is not sufficient since it doesn't include tags and therefore I won't know where my items are. I posted a question about allowing us to include tags in printing as that'd make my life much simpler but that suggestion hasn't been implemented as of yet.

I wrote a little shell script to utilize wget to retrieve each of my collections and then automatically print them all for me. I don't plan on using this very often, probably once every month or two, but I like to have a hard copy list of my collection just in case Beckett.com or my internet is down for instance.

I am not modifying the output - all of the Beckett statements about copyrights and such are intact.

Obviously I question if this is violating the Terms of Service in any way as I really don't want to get banned lol. I don't see anything in there that explicitly forbids this but there's always the general clause of Beckett can cut off access for any reason at any time.

I've setup up the script such that it has a 5 second sleep between each wget to limit the impact to the servers and can change this easily to a larger number if needed. But 5 seconds seems reasonable if I was to click through each collection and hit print.

[jacobystealshome]

could this be viewed as being similar to a partial scraping of the site?

[aktlingit]

(07-21-2012 04:13 PM)jacobystealshome Wrote:  could this be viewed as being similar to a partial scraping of the site?

Depends on how you want to look at it, since it's automated yes. Really the only thing that the server admins would be able to detect is that my user-agent string is currently the wget default (wget/) but I can override that and make it state it's Firefox if I really cared too.

But since it's only my data and it's no different than me doing it by hand I'd say it's not scraping site data, but rather personal data, so no.

But I could also use a GUI automation tool such as Rational Functional Tester to do the same thing and Beckett would never even know since the browser being used would be my standard Firefox browser. The reason I haven't done this is RFT is quite memory intensive and overkill for this simple task.

Again, I'm not trying to do anything malicious or even use the data in a way it's not meant to be used, I'm just trying to simplify the process for my needs using the tools available at my disposal