About

This site was created to be a fun tool to find US based makerspaces. The Python script below was used to do Google searches for a state name plus the word 'makerspace' and return a list of makerspace names along with their urls which was then saved to a json file.

This JSON file was parsed to clean up names and verify websites. A map of the US was craeted as an SVG along with some JavaScript to make the interactive map on the main page.

If interested, the code for this page can be found on Github.

        
  from requests import get
  from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
  import json
  from time import sleep

  state_list = [ 'state_name' ]

  maker_list = {}

  # Filter results to find only title and links.
  def filter_results(raw_html):
      soup = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, "html.parser")
      result_block = soup.find_all("div", attrs={"class": "g"})
      search_results = []
      for result in result_block:
          link = result.find("a", href=True)
          title = result.find("h3")
          if link and title:
              # print(f"FOUND:\nTITLE: {title.text} \nLINK: {link['href']}")
              arr = [title.text, link["href"]]
              search_results.append(arr)

      return search_results

  # Create a Google search url for a given state_name.
  # Then return the html from a url request.
  def search_google(state, num_results):
      user_agent = {
          "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) "
          "Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36"
      }

      search_term = state + "+makerspace"
      google_url = "https://www.google.com/search?q={}&num={}&hl={}".format(
          search_term, num_results, "en"
      )

      response = get(google_url, headers=user_agent, proxies=None)
      response.raise_for_status()
      return response.text

  # Search all the states in the list.
  # Add the title and url to each state in the json file.
  for state in state_list:
      print(f"Finding spaces in {state}")
      state_spaces = filter_results(search_google(state, 25))
      maker_list[state] = state_spaces

      print(f"Saving {state} to JSON...")
      with open("./py-scripts/spaceList.json", "r+") as json_file:
          json.dump(maker_list, json_file)

      # Make sure to wait a few seconds between searches,
      # else Google will block your IP address for a bit.
      sleep(4)