baby-name-scraper
Scrapes U.S. baby names from the Social Security Administration. Uses Node.js.
Running
npm install
npm start
Good stuff is in ./csv.
Note: You'll need a relatively recent version of Node, one that supports Object.assign. If you have nvm installed, you can just nvm use and you'll be good to go.
Why?
I had a baby! Yay. I have paternity leave! Also yay.
I wanted to play with baby name data, and found Hadley Wickham's data-baby-names scraper/parser. But, it didn't work! I eventually figured out that it's because SSA went SSL (good on them), so all that was needed to get the R scraper to work was http -> https.
But by then, I'd already decided it would be nice to have a version of this that was easier to run than "install R, install R libs, make sure Ruby install is up to date, wade into this and that". Something more like npm start. And here we are.