"It also highlights the slight problem I have with ‘learning to code’ initiatives like Codecademy. Don’t get me wrong in any way. Getting people to learn to code is awesome. But having been through a heck of alot of the exercises on that site, I’m just not sure it is really that useful. On one hand the exercises are not really task based but syntax based. E.g. learning the syntax of a ‘for’ loop. The other issue for me is that they teach you javascript – the client side scripting language created for web, yet they teach you no practical web based tasks."

"NASCAR.com, to my knowledge, does not provide an API for acquiring driver stats. Here is a screen scraper for NASCAR.com to acquire all the relevant stats and races."

"The boilerpipe library provides algorithms to detect and remove the surplus "clutter" (boilerplate, templates) around the main textual content of a web page."

"Readability is a browser bookmarklet that takes a crack at wiping out all that junk so you can have a more enjoyable reading experience. It works with all the latest browsers and its success rate is pretty respectable (we'd guess over 90% of web sites are handled properly)."