Otsch's Head

Hi 👋

My name is Christian Olear but everybody calls me Otsch.

I am a passionate (PHP) Web Developer and Founder living in Linz (🇦🇹). Currently I am working on crwl.io , which will be a new Web Crawling and Scraping SaaS Tool, that will allow you to rapidly configure crawlers to fetch data from the web in an automated way.

If you want to get some data from the web and need help with that or have questions around this topic, I'm always happy to help. Don't be shy and contact me!

I am passionate about qualitative software development, an open web and open source software. So, I also maintain the open source project crwlr.software, a PHP library for web crawling and scraping. Check it out!

On this page I blog about coding, a little about my entrepreneurial journey and share other things about my work.

Otsch Projects

Blog

Version 1.8 of the crwlr/crawler package is out, introducing key new functions that will replace existing ones in v2.0. Addressing previous issues with composing crawling result data, this update provides a solution that enhances performance, minimizes memory usage further, and simplifies the process, making it more intuitive and easier to understand.

Since working with generators can be a bit tricky if you're new to them, this post offers an intro on how to use them and highlights common pitfalls to avoid.

Abstract classes cannot be instantiated directly, posing a challenge when testing functionality implemented within the abstract class itself. In this article, I will share my approach to addressing this issue.

This is the first article of our "Crwlr Recipes" series, providing a collection of thoroughly explained code examples for specific crawling and scraping use-cases. This first article describes how you can crawl any website fully (all pages) and extract the data of schema.org structured data objects from all its pages, with just a few lines of code.

My friend Florian Bauer recently posted an article saying that PHP needs a rebranding and that he would rename it to HypeScript. Here's my two cents on that subject.

I'm very proud to announce that version 1.0 of the crawler package is finally released. This article gives you an overview of why you should use this library for your web crawling and scraping jobs.

crwlr.software
What's new in crwlr / crawler v0.6?
2022-10-03

Version 0.6 is probably the biggest update so far with a lot of new features and steps from crawling whole websites, over sitemaps to extracting metadata and schema.org structured data from HTML. Here is an overview of all the new stuff.

crwlr.software
What's new in crwlr / crawler v0.5?
2022-09-03

We're already at v0.5 of the crawler package and this version comes with a lot of new features and improvements. Here's a quick overview of what's new.

There is a new package in town called query-string. It allows to create, access and manipulate query strings for HTTP requests in a very convenient way. Here's a quick overview of what you can do with it and also how it can be used via the url package.

crwlr.software
What's new in crwlr / crawler v0.4
2022-05-10

Last friday version 0.4 of the crawler package was released with some pretty useful improvements. Read what's shipped with this new minor update.

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