This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

Occasionally I find myself in the highly fortunate position to be asked to contribute to a scholarly journal without having any professional incentive to do so.  This is exciting because I’m as flattered as anyone when someone else is interested enough in my writing to want to republish it.  It also gives me a chance to come into contact with the kinds of contracts that academic publishers offer their contributors.  To put it mildly, these contracts are insane.  In exchange for an unpaid contribution, the contracts expect the authors to give the publishers all sorts of exclusive rights and to indemnify the authors against any sort of infringement lawsuit.

After waddling my way through some python learning courses, I finally stumbled into an excellent “next step” programming challenge.  It had the ideal combination of a connection to my real life, super straightforward goals, and a handful of moving parts that I was pretty sure I could figure out (but that I would, in fact, have to figure out).  The project was to download an image of the front page of every People’s Daily back to 1993.  This post is going to walk through the process of how to build the python script in a way that I wish someone had done when I was trying to figure this out.  That means instead of code snippets inside of a longer unified program (or just snippets) it will have a series of discrete programs that build upon themselves.  For me, that makes it easier to figure out how each part works.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.