Bazos.cz watchdog
Hi guys, looking for advice on creating an actor that would scrap bazos.cz, well-known czech classified ads portal. I was kind of surprised that I did not find a ready soultion in the Store 🙂 The goal is to build a real estate watchdog for personal use. The one provided by Bazos itself is really basic, so I am sure it would benefit many others. Has anyone ever built something that can be reused? If not, could you please advise how to get started? Thank you.
2 Replies
ambitious-aqua•3y ago
Heya @bor_go! Thanks for the question and for the great idea 😄 This actor would be super useful for me.
I built something similar for my own personal use a while back when I was searching for a flat in a specific area. It monitored Bazos as well as a few other sites.
Unfortunately, I've lost the code to my solution, as I never posted it on GitHub, but my solution was to use the Schedules feature on the Apify platform to run the actor twice a day. It would automatically go through the listings for
X city/village. If any of the listings contained the keywords of what I was looking for (such as 1+kk), it would send an email to me with the link to the listing so I could check it out manually. For this I used the apify/send-mail actor: https://apify.com/apify/send-mail
I'd definitely recommend using Crawlee to build the project, but if you don't have much programming experience, you can find a freelancer in the #💻hire-freelancers channel who can work with you to do this project.adverse-sapphireOP•3y ago
Sooo, I was able to build it finally. Almost with no coding. I used Apify's Cherio scraper actor with simple input configuration to map correct values (description, image, title...) using jquery. I then used Make.com connect Apify and Airtable. Now my scheduled task saves data into new dataset, Make.com loads them all to Airtable. The biggest challange was to setup Make.com scenario to check whether the record already exists in Airtable and if it does, skip it. Now the last thing is to setup the Airtable base, so it nicely shows all data (images, etc.) I will then be able to review the new offering, filter (interested, not interested...) all using Airtable's iphone app.
