James Moon mooniker

How to JSONify a Mess of Legal Summaries With Node.js

Have you ever been to the Virginia judicial system's website for state supreme court opinions, found the index of slip opinions going back to 1995 on one long-scrolling page, and wondered, how could this be made more useful? Instead of politely asking the clerk of the court to set up a web API, let's see how long it takes to do it ourselves.

But why?

Maybe our legal reporter or scholar needs a better way to sort and track court opinions. Maybe we're building an app to aggregate legal abstracts in a friendly JSON format. Maybe we're looking for ways to turn a public or government document dumping ground into something more usable. Or maybe we want to practice web scraping and JSONifying something with Node.js.

Prerequisites

ACL / Roles + Permissions

Virgen-ACL (`virgen-acl`)

https://github.com/djvirgen/virgen-acl
"Simple in-memory ACL for node.js apps. Supports arbitrary roles and resources, including role/resource detection using a simple interface. Additionally supports custom assertions for more complex rules."
Comments: "Simple and elegant, create your own checks. No middleware?"

Node ACL (`acl`)

https://github.com/OptimalBits/node_acl
"...a minimalistic ACL implementation inspired by Zend_ACL."

	#!/bin/bash

	# (optional) You might need to set your PATH variable at the top here
	# depending on how you run this script
	#PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

	# Hosted Zone ID e.g. BJBK35SKMM9OE
	ZONEID="enter zone id here"

	# The CNAME you want to update e.g. hello.example.com