# Rails demo application for web page scraping

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-demo-application-for-web-page-scraping/54536>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [March 7, 2006, 11:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-demo-application-for-web-page-scraping/54536 "2006-03-07T23:41:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![davidtl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/35a633/32.png) [@davidtl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/davidtl)\
**Post date:** [March 7, 2006, 11:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-demo-application-for-web-page-scraping/54536/1 "2006-03-07T23:41:03Z")

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Hi all

I wrote an application in Ruby on Rails which breaks up web pages and  
allow you to weave these pieces together into your own personal page,  
similar to a tapestry. I would like to invite interested programmers and  
web users alike to take a look and, if possible, give me some  
feedbacks/criticisms so I can improve the site. The goal here is to  
stretch Ruby on Rails to see what it can really do, maybe growing the  
site into a showcase for this new technology. There are good examples of  
AJAX, drag and drop, and other DHTML techniques too.

I have had various success in scraping web pages, some are easier to  
scrape than others. Some do not look right at all, but generally, sites  
that have lots of tables of dynamic contents are the best to scrape  
(like Yahoo Financial pages, for instance). Site with a lot of CSS  
positioning are more difficult to do.

I plan to do a few more features like automatic data feeds, database  
population, code generation (Java/Ruby/SQL) etc. of the scraped data,  
but all depends on if there is enough interests, as I have a day job to  
go to, so can only do this in my spare time.

Anyway, the URL for the site is [http://www.boxaweb.com/](http://www.boxaweb.com/).

Thank you for your time.

David