Track LinkedIn followers

scverse-stats/collectors/linkedinCollector.ts

@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+import "dotenv/config";
+import { LinkedInDataSchema } from "../types";
+import { saveJson } from "../utils";
+
+const COMPANY = "scverse";
+const PROFILE_URL = `https://www.linkedin.com/company/${COMPANY}/`;
+
+// LinkedIn serves the follower count to logged-out visitors, but only to clients it takes for a browser.
+const BROWSER_USER_AGENT =
+  "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36";
+
+// Deliberately does not match abbreviated counts such as "10K followers": a missing number is better
+// than a wrong one, and the field is optional downstream.
+const FOLLOWERS = /([\d,.]+)\s*followers/i;
+
+export async function collectLinkedInStats(): Promise<void> {
+  console.log("Collecting LinkedIn stats...");
+
+  // There is no public API for this, and LinkedIn blocks some datacentre ranges outright, so a
+  // failure here must not take the whole run down. Write nothing and the combiner omits the field.
+  try {
+    const response = await fetch(PROFILE_URL, {
+      headers: {
+        "user-agent": BROWSER_USER_AGENT,
+        "accept-language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
+      },
+    });
+
+    if (!response.ok) {
+      console.warn(`LinkedIn returned ${response.status}, skipping follower count`);
+      return;
+    }
+
+    const match = FOLLOWERS.exec(await response.text());
+    if (!match) {
+      console.warn("Could not find a follower count on the LinkedIn page, skipping");
+      return;
+    }
+
+    const validated = LinkedInDataSchema.parse({
+      followers_count: Number(match[1].replace(/[,.]/g, "")),
+      company: COMPANY,
+      timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
+    });
+
+    await saveJson("linkedin.json", validated);
+    console.log(`Followers: ${validated.followers_count}`);
+  } catch (error) {
+    console.warn(`Could not collect LinkedIn stats: ${error}`);
+  }
+}

scverse-stats/combiner.ts

@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ export async function combineStats(): Promise<void> {
   const githubData = await loadJson("github.json");
   const zulipData = await loadJson("zulip.json");
   const blueskyData = await loadJson("bluesky.json");
+  const linkedinData = await loadJson("linkedin.json");
   const ecosystemData = await loadJson("ecosystem.json");
   const citationsData = await loadJson("citations.json");
   const pepyData = await loadJson("pepy.json");
@@ -18,6 +19,10 @@ export async function combineStats(): Promise<void> {
     combinedStats.bluesky_followers = blueskyData.followers_count;
   }
 
+  if (linkedinData) {
+    combinedStats.linkedin_followers = linkedinData.followers_count;
+  }
+
   if (zulipData) {
     combinedStats.zulip_users = zulipData.active_users;
     combinedStats.core_team_size = zulipData.core_team_size;

scverse-stats/index.ts

@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ import "dotenv/config";
 import { collectGitHubStats } from "./collectors/gitHubCollector";
 import { collectZulipStats } from "./collectors/zulipCollector";
 import { collectBlueskyStats } from "./collectors/blueskyCollector";
+import { collectLinkedInStats } from "./collectors/linkedinCollector";
 import { collectEcosystemStats } from "./collectors/ecosystemCollector";
 import { collectCitationStats } from "./collectors/citationsCollector";
 import { collectPepyStats } from "./collectors/pepyCollector";
@@ -14,6 +15,7 @@ async function main() {
     collectGitHubStats(),
     collectZulipStats(),
     collectBlueskyStats(),
+    collectLinkedInStats(),
     collectEcosystemStats(),
     collectCitationStats(),
     collectPepyStats(),

scverse-stats/types.ts

@@ -38,6 +38,15 @@ export const BlueskyDataSchema = z.object({
 
 export type BlueskyData = z.infer<typeof BlueskyDataSchema>;
 
+// LinkedIn schemas
+export const LinkedInDataSchema = z.object({
+  followers_count: z.number(),
+  company: z.string(),
+  timestamp: z.string(),
+});
+
+export type LinkedInData = z.infer<typeof LinkedInDataSchema>;
+
 // Ecosystem packages schemas
 export const EcosystemPackageSchema = z.object({
   name: z.string(),
@@ -120,6 +129,7 @@ export type CitationsData = z.infer<typeof CitationsDataSchema>;
 export const CombinedStatsSchema = z.object({
   timestamp: z.string(),
   bluesky_followers: z.number().optional(),
+  linkedin_followers: z.number().optional(),
   zulip_users: z.number(),
   core_team_size: z.number(),
   github: z