Vlookups are a very powerful excel formula and they are used a lot to blend & match data in excel. In this example I am going to show you how you can do a Vlookup in python in a few lines of code. Why? Excel vlookups over complex strings and large datasets are very compute […]
Python Blog Posts
Python is an incredibly easy to learn and powerful programming language. These posts are aimed at programmers of all levels looking to use Python to improve their day to day digital marketing tasks.
Spinning text with python
As you may know I started programming because I work in SEO. I’ve been doing SEO for over 12 years and back when I started I was using software called scrapebox. It was really effective at discovering blogs based on keywords you provided and then posting comments on people’s websites. With this and the discovery […]
Multiprocessing in python to speed up log file processing
I have a love hate relationship with the optimisation of code, essentially because it can be very rewarding or soul destroying. As part of log file processing one area which could be improved is the speed at which you can processes the lines in the log file. First a quick recap as to how python […]
Iterating in chunks over a large dataset in Django
I came across a bit of a challenge today when building my log file parsing tool. The client demo I’d built the dataset on was almost 1TB. With a total of 2.5billion rows, I’ll let that sink in for a minute, 2.5 BILLION! Googlebot has been busy over the last 20 months. I needed to […]
Python Web Scraping Tutorial For Beginners
Introduction to web scraping In a ideal world you wouldn’t need to scrape the web, but the world is far from ideal, websites are far from well structured and in order to gather the data we need it’s likely you’ll have to scrape. I currently find myself having to extract information from the web almost […]
Upload a Big CSV file into Big Query
Big query is a really good, cheap, quick (insert superlative) platform to query and visualise data. It has a simple connector into DataStudio which is great to use in reporting as it’s very sharable. Big Query has its limits and one of them is getting data into it. To upload directly within the interface there […]