kevinhowbrook / ufo-poems

This is a project for NaNoGenMo (https://github.com/NaNoGenMo). The idea is to scrape UFO sightings and turn the reports into poems

This is a project for NaNoGenMo. The idea is to scrape UFO sightings and turn the reports into poems

Getting UFO Data

Scrape responsibly, see https://www.scrapehero.com/how-to-prevent-getting-blacklisted-while-scraping/#easiest-way-to-find-if-a-site-doesnt-want-data-to-be-scraped

I'm using http://ufostalker.com to get the data, mainly because the reports are much more interesting than official sightings.

Running

First run pipenv isntall and pipenv shell to start the environment.

python main.py will start the scraping.

Proxies

Proxies are generated via proxies = gen_proxies. This will populate a text file with a list of I.P addresses to use.

Pool

Pool is set to 10: with Pool(10) as p: which means 10 requests. This can be increased or decreased. But be nice and don't actually DoS a site. ❤️

Writing the poems

Once the database is populated, run python writer.py this will generate a ufo_poems.md file. There are over 90,000 sightings so for efficiency I'm just using the latest 4000 (which will equate to > 50,000 words in total) e.g data = get_data()[:4000]. To get all the sightings, just remove the slice.

Example of poems: ufo_poems.md