The SparkFun ESP8266 “Thing” is one of the cheapest Internet of Things (IoT) platforms available.
There are some great examples on how to post data to data.sparkfun.com, but we need to modify that code in order to pull data from a website. That is accomplished with the humble HTTP GET request. I put together a quick example that pulls www.example.com and prints it to the serial console. Note that you will need perform some slight modifications to the board (or use Realterm) to see the serial data.