A way for Divvy users to scrape and download their own bikeshare data.
Possible successsor to the original DivvyBrags and DivvyBrags 2. Here's some context:
- Divvy Shuts Down Inventor's 'Well Done' Mile-Counting App
- 'DivvyBrags' App Returns, But Without the Bragging, For Now
- Divvy Diary: There's an app for that....
No API for Divvy.
Server-side scraping is banned at scale.
Their website keeps changing.
That makes maintaining a client-side scraping app over the years a big chore.
Yes.
3+ years.
3.2+ million trips.
Lots of nerdy biking developers.
No API.
Tech as advocacy. Get people to tweet with #DivvyAPI.
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Create at least a little bit of Internet pressure on Divvy to make an API or at least a "Download all Trips" button and
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Serve Divvy users. Serving users products based on individual trip data is not time-effective in the long run unless Divvy offers an API or a download button.
This is pre-release right now, for my own personal exploration. Other interested developers are free to use & build.
There is no Chrome store version of this extension because it's too minimal.
Right now, the extension creates a "Download as CSV" button on each monthly trips page for a user of divvybikes.com.
The Divvy trips site goes one page at a time, so manual concatenation is required at this stage to build up a single CSV with all trips.
From Getting Started: Building a Chrome Extension:
Visit chrome://extensions in your browser (or open up the Chrome menu by clicking the icon to the far right of the Omnibox: The menu's icon is three horizontal bars. and select Extensions under the Tools menu to get to the same place).
Ensure that the Developer mode checkbox in the top right-hand corner is checked.
Click Load unpacked extension… to pop up a file-selection dialog.
Navigate to the directory in which your extension files live, and select it.
- Go to https://www.divvybikes.com/
- Log in
- Go to https://www.divvybikes.com/account/trips
- Scroll to the bottom of the page
- Make filenames more descriptive
- Write bash script for manual concatenation of files
- Detect and handle case when there are no trips in a month
- Do something useful / interesting with my own data (I want to put it on a map)
- Consider where geocoding might happen
- see if there is any interest in the product or the data scraping extension, if there is interest...
- Think about releasing this on the Chrome store.
- Think about adding some kind of server to store trips and make cool things for non-technical users. Users would have to agree to some kind of disclaimer that they are voluntarily sharing their bikeshare data with a third party. Don't do this unless there is actual user demand for bikeshare data product.
I am a freelancer looking to pick up more hours. If you would like to pay me to work on this because you want to see it happen, please let me know.