Hi, reporters! It occurred to me recently that I should do something for TFR’s sixth anniversary… which was actually last month, apparently. But six years strong! Wow!
The very first post I ever wrote was for Outwit Hub – a tool that downloads all the images, links, datasets and files off a website.
It’s basically an easy way to do scraping, which can get a bit hairy. Unlike a lot of scraping methods, which involve venturing into a jungle of thousands of lines of code, Outwit Hub feels more like a web browser. Just kind of a weird and old-looking one.
Once you type in your site, you can use the sidebar to select and download all kinds of things. Outwit Hub so good, in fact, that I still recommended it to some Columbia University students learning data journalism this summer. What other tool can say that??
You can only download 100 rows at a time with the free version, but it can handle stuff that other scrapers can’t, like pagination, searching and logins. Wild! So if you want to back up, download, investigate or even just poke around a site, Outwit Hub is your guy.