ESP8266 Community Forum

As a hardware oriented person, I am truly having problems setting up ESP8266+Arduino to read from the internet. I am able to connect it directly to a device (local server from ESP), but now I want to make it read from a website. I've found that SparkFun give 50 MBs for free to use at: https://data.sparkfun.com/ . The problem is that sometimes I can read the HTML from a web, but sometimes it returns nothing.
I am sure someone has done this before many times, so can someone at least point me to a place where to look for a code/description or even better write me here.

Cheers!