So yesterday I sat down to finally figure out how to build that daily Virgo horoscope thing my sister keeps bugging me about. Started simple – just wanted to pull zodiac info from somewhere and show it clean. Figured Python could handle it since I messed with it before.
The Big Scraping Idea That Flopped
First dumb move? Thought I could just grab horoscope text from some astrology pages. Wrote this scraper script that looked like:
- Used BeautifulSoup to dig through page code
- Tried finding divs with class “horoscope-content”
- Wanted to strip out all the messy ads and links
Complete disaster. Either the text came out full of junk symbols, or whole sections were missing. Worse part? Got my IP blocked after like 50 tries. Website thought I was some hacker bot.
Patching Holes With Manual Crap
Okay, plan B. Grabbed last month’s printed horoscope magazine from my coffee table. Decided to:
- Type out each day’s Virgo prediction myself
- Stuffed them into a crappy Excel sheet
- Made the Python script read from this file instead
Looked terrible on the site. Plain white page with black Times New Roman text. My sister saw it and laughed her head off.
The Clunky Formatting Nightmare
Tried making it pretty with CSS. Added some purple background because “Virgo vibes” or whatever. Big mistake. Now the horoscope text blended right into the background. Could barely read it. Fixed colors but then:
- Text overflowed on mobile screens
- Date headers disappeared on Firefox
- Line breaks went crazy after emojis
Spent three hours just making it look normal on my own phone. Still broke on my neighbor’s Samsung.
My Half-Assed “Solution”
Gave up and did the minimum. Made it show yesterday’s prediction if today’s failed. Called it “Wisdom from the Stars Past” with fake profound font. Put a disclaimer at the bottom:
Warning: Not actual future telling. For amusement only. If stars make you quit your job, that’s your problem.
Ran it for two weeks. My sister says her coworker actually followed the “lucky career day” advice. Got coffee spilled on her keyboard and blamed me. Mission accomplished?
