This ruby script uses Hpricot to scrape the Freshly Pressed pages on Wordpress.com. It then stores its results as JSON on S3. Here is the related blog post to this Gist: http://idevrecipes.com/?p=260

wordpress_freshly_pressed.rb

#!/usr/bin/ruby -rubygems
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
require 'aws/s3'
require 'yaml'
require 'json'

def save_in_s3(key, data, bucket, options)
  amazon_s3_settings = YAML.load(open(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "amazon_s3.yml"){ |f| f.read }))
  AWS::S3::Base.establish_connection!(:access_key_id => amazon_s3_settings[:access_key_id], :secret_access_key => amazon_s3_settings[:secret_access_key])
  AWS::S3::S3Object.store(key, data, amazon_s3_settings[bucket], options)
end

num_pages = 10
(1..num_pages).each do |page|
  picks = Array.new
  doc = Hpricot(open("http://wordpress.com/?load=editorpicks&fp=#{page}"))
  
  doc.search('.pick').each do |pick_element|
    # Sponsored posts are being skipped until I can figure out a way to get a 320px wide version
    # of the images used for Sponsored posts
    next if pick_element.inner_html.include? 'Sponsored Post'
    
    pick = Hash.new
    
    pick[:url] = pick_element.at('a')['href']
    pick[:title] = pick_element.at('.posttitle').inner_text
    subtitle = pick_element.at('small')
    pick[:subtitle] = subtitle.inner_text if subtitle
    
    picture = pick_element.at('.picture')
    if picture
      style_array = picture['style'].split(';').collect{|x| Hash[*x.split(':',2).collect{|a|a.strip}]}
      style_hash = Hash.new
      style_array.each {|x| style_hash = style_hash.merge(x)}
      
      background_image = style_hash["background-image"]
      image_url = background_image.match(/url\('([^']+)'\)/)[1]
      pick[:image] = image_url.gsub('w=223', 'w=320')
      
      scale_increase = 1.43497757847534 # 320.0/223.0
      pick[:y_offset] = style_hash["background-position"].split[1].sub('px','').to_f * scale_increase
    else
      pick[:image] = pick_element.at('img')['src']
    end
    picks << pick
  end
  
  picks << {:next_page => page + 1} unless (page == num_pages - 1)
  
  save_in_s3("freshlypressed/#{page}.json", picks.to_json, :wordpress_bucket, {:access => 'public-read'})
end