Headed to St. Louis 2007/10/05
Tomorrow I head to St. Louis to do a bit of Yahoo! recruiting at my alma mater. If you're a web geek and go to Wash U, make sure you come see us.
Preparing for the trip, I've been trying to decide what to read on the flight. I could pick up some fiction, but let's be honest, I'll never do that voluntarily. So I decided to read 37Signals' Getting Real. Being a clever miser, I made a little script to download all 91 essays so I don't have to buy the PDF to read it offline. Enjoy:
Update
I like the 37Signals guys, so until we clarify things, I've taken down the PHP code. However, I believe this is fair use. The copyright notice non-37Signals-Matt pasted below is simply not applicable since I have not redistributed their content by providing the script.
A bit of automation has little to do with the fact that the content is freely available online. If it makes anyone sleep any better, I'll recycle my original dump and go back to the website and click print 91 times. Do forgive me for saving myself some time.
Comments (6)
Haha, you're crazy man. I actually have the whole thing and printed out too, so let me know if you want it before you take off. Interesting read, but I only read half of it before ADD kicked in.
— Dimitry — 2007/10/05 10:33 am
"All content copyright ©1999-2006 37signals, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this book or site may be reproduced or redistributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from 37signals, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review."
Shell out the $19, it's worth it. They're a bunch of hardworking guys who deserve the credit where credit is due.
— Matt Williams — 2007/10/05 2:24 pm
Richard, we haven't given you permission to steal our content this way. Please remove this script. Thank you.
— Matt @ 37signals — 2007/10/05 2:32 pm
For real? You guys really give a shit if he grabs some HTML off your website so he can read it offline? What if he printed it and read the hard copy? What if he opened the cached HTML of his hard drive while he was on the flight?
Hope the comments above are a joke...
— Mike Malone — 2007/10/05 2:54 pm
I'd find their request more legitimate if there was a robots.txt saying that a web crawler can't pull down pages from their site.
The script written was general enough that with small modifications, you could use it to crawl any site. ( PATTERN in a constant, required command line arguments in argv.. )
— David Hall — 2007/10/06 8:00 am
@David, it didn't even need to do that. AFAIK it preg_matched for any links that started with "ch" and had a number in it. The only thing is, roman numerals would have killed it :P
— Mike Panchenko — 2007/10/09 7:18 am