lafond

Hi! Absolutely zero political agenda here, just someone wanting to track the price of fuel.

While Wikipedia isn't always to be trusted (everyone knows that), the situation has been widely described as a crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Strait_of_Hormuz_crisis.

Just want to clear that up that the jargon is selected specifically from a general understanding and not one from a political skew!

I also wasn't tracking fuel prices back in 2022, otherwise I probably would have included similar dialog given the nature of what caused the prices to rise.

Exactly the mentality I had while building the site

GasBuddy is great, no doubt! I was well familiar with them before working on the site. The issue is that their data is user reported and not directly reported from Costco's warehouse numbers - so there were a few times that the price was vastly different from what was at the pump.

If only they exposed this data!! Would have been so fun adding the display to the site

It's now available! https://jack.bio/feed :-)

Great minds think alike! Tough you weren't able to find anything cool with it, but glad I wasn't the only one thinking to automate it :)

OP here - I did some pretty heavy research on this topic to make sure I'd be okay publishing this / automating anything at all. From what I looked into (and mind you, I'm a 23 year old security researcher & not a lawyer) there are a few recent landmark court cases (Van Buren vs. United States, hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn) that protect webscraping of a public-facing page without bypass of any technological barriers. Furthermore, Florida has the Computer Abuse and Data Recovery Act that defines any malicious behavior as overuse of resources or an intent to defraud or cause harm, both of which I was very conscious about not violating. I appreciate the concern regardless!

Appreciate the kind words :)

Author here!

After receiving the C&D, the method with which I was getting the data was removed/patched (which I'm now noticing was not mentioned in the blog post...) I did ask them if there was any thing I could to keep it up and never received a response, and rather than playing a cat & mouse game of "now you don't have our branding, but you are scraping are data so here's another C&D" I just took it down :)

Author here - I absolutely do have more to learn about trademarks and appreciate everyones comments :) I was attempting to go for a good faith representation but (obviously) now know that wasn't the best way to go about it.

As far as rigorous research, I looked semi-heavily and couldn't find anything in relation to it. I'm sure it's not a foreign concept to use local area data in this way for disaster planning though!