Scraping for the masses: How I made Scrapely, an extension that will help ANYONE to scrape Facebook, LinkedIn and other websites

Scraping. Everybody does it, but nobody likes to admit it.

*If a company like Google can do it - or how did you think they could index those gazillion pages on the internet? - why should I feel bad for doing it as well? *

I'm a big fan of Facebook groups, and I'm an active member in quite a few, including a few growth hacking groups.

One of the most frequent questions I see is: "How can I scrape X?"

If I've ever scraped something similar, I'd just send them a message with the code. More often than not, the person that asked it is not very technical and before I know it I'm spending 30 minutes on helping them to just run the code.

So at one point I thought: Why don't I make a Chrome Extension that helps them to scrape the most basic stuff (Facebook Groups, Producthunt upvoters, etc)?

A few solid weekends of hacking later, Scrapely was born!

Using Scrapely is very simple. You just install it from the Chrome Web Store.

After you install it, you simply paste a Google Sheet ID in it, and go to the page you want to scrape. Then you open the Scrapely window, click "Scrape" and all the data will show up in your Google Sheet!

When I first launched Scrapely with the help of Gilles, it was very buggy. I've rewritten it from the ground up with Vue.js, and not only is it prettier, it's also much more stable and faster.

Happy scraping!