After several readings to Scrapy docs I'm still not catching the diferrence between using CrawlSpider rules and implementing my own link extraction mechanism on the callback method.
I'm about to write a new web crawler using the latter approach, but just becuase I had a bad experience in a past project using rules. I'd really like to know exactly what I'm doing and why.
Anyone familiar with this tool?
Thanks for your help!
If you want selective crawling, like fetching "Next" links for pagination etc., it's better to write your own crawler. But for general crawling, you should use crawlspider and filter out the links that you don't need to follow using Rules & process_links function.
Take a look at the crawlspider code in \scrapy\contrib\spiders\crawl.py , it isn't too complicated.
Following links, Scrapy web crawler framework