Preliminary note: This a just-for-fun article. Please take it with a huge grain of salt.

As I promised before on my Easy Way to Steal from Other Sites article (read that article for more background information and some source code), this time I’ll post screenshots of my pet project while I was in college called “Bete”. In case you’re wondering, “bete” is an Indonesian word roughly meaning “bored”. Yeah, at that time I was bored enough writing the final undergraduate paper so I thought it’d be fun to scrape some Friendster girls that I thought were cute. Please, do call me a dork if you so desire.

This is the front page of Bete: (It took some time to run correctly on my current Ubuntu Linux system, but after it works, I am surprised yet delighted how this uber-old project still works!!)

Note: I hand-designed the layout/theme myself. As you can see I’m quite a talented designer, aren’t I?

The front page is simple, it just lists the primary photos of the girls. Clicking on a photo reveals…

What do you think? Don’t tell me they’re “not bad”! That is seriously insulting my taste of chicks…

Even though now you are probably thinking largely about the girls (or how a weird guy I am)… Technically, this is just a demonstration that scraping actually works. I’ve also done TDD (Test-Driven-Development) back then, it’s amazing that the tests still pass:

Before I developed Bete, there was a former pilot project, intuitively named “Cute Girls” (for lack of better name). It was highly manual though, and used very simple PHP code to power some dynamic features:

One of my favorites:

You’ve GOT to have some comments!!! Come on, after all this…!?!?

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Ajax, Opinions, Rails, Ruby, Tips, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.