Greetings!

I have 2 related knowledge bases that I have been working on for a long time which I would like to download for my portfolio. I reduced the size of one by 5/6, and the other by 4/5, in addition to very very heavy ease-of-use editing . It is a substantial improvement, and what I want to market myself to do, if I have to keep working. I actively enjoy doing it.

My company will not approve the third party backup application for zendesk (the host of these kbs) and I don’t know how to write a script to back it up or anything. I don’t know how any of that works, but zendesk recommends a python script.

I checked a few indexers and couldn’t find the pages, but even if it was indexed by url, I can’t really go through and download individual page links, so I’m not sure what to do. I don’t know python, or anyone who knows Python.

For context, the project as a whole has been my world for the last 9 months, it’s not what I was hired to fix explicitly, which is why they dgaf about my portfolio, but it’s what I want to do (and I’m great at it, even have a degree for it!). I want a snapshot of the whole thing on my last day, ideally including the archived articles I got rid of.

Any ideas for someone who doesn’t code?

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Ah! Ok. From what you said, it sounded like it was something only available on an internal network. Like a corporate Wiki or some such. It’s totally possible I just missed something in the original post that would have disabused me of that incorrect notion.

    (Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer and like to geek out on intellectual property law studies sometimes, but ultimately don’t really know what I’m talking about here. But…)

    If it’s publicly available, that probably doesn’t make scraping a copy legal. (It’s called “copyright” because it places restrictions on “copying” (though it also places restrictions on other things like “public performance” and such.))

    The knowledge bases being publicly available might make it less likely that they’ll pursue you over anything. Maybe. But that depends on your boss’ state of mind and such. One thought might be to do the scraping through Tor, but if you’re doing this scraping close to the time you’re leaving the company, that may not really give you any significant amount of palusible deniability.

    Now, the fact that it’s available on the open internet may open up some other options. If the number of pages in question isn’t too terribly large, you could request one-by-one that the Wayback Machine save pages. (The “save page now” section at the bottom right.) That would mean a) no learning curve b) it’s not you copying things so if there were any legal issues, it would most likely (again, IANAL) be Archive.org fighting them not you. That archive would stay up for a long time. You wouldn’t have a copy locally, but if you had it bookmarked, it’d stay out there on the internet in a frozen state for you to reference any time.

    Aslo, if you did go the wget route, you wouldn’t have to deal with the cookies or anything, which makes things easier.