A scraper I abandoned

The problem

I wanted a feed of new data center announcements so I could follow where capacity was being built.

What I built

A small scraper that pulled press releases and saved them to a local database.

What worked

For a few weeks it actually surfaced things I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

What broke

The sources changed their markup, my scraper silently broke, and I never built any alerting — so I didn’t notice for a month. By then I’d lost interest in babysitting it.

What I’d do differently

Start with the smallest possible version, and add monitoring before features.

Status

Dead. Leaving it here because the lesson was worth more than the tool.