While building GeeQE I wanted to enhance the CC dump of Stack Overflow’s data. The main reason I wanted to do this was to capture Gravatar hashes and user badges. To do this I decided to continue using Ruby as I did with the XML loading (see my previous post on XML parsing with Ruby). The easy choice was of course Hpricot to parse the HTML from the users page and Mechanize to move from one page to the next.