I needed a distraction. Seriously. A big one. My previous attempt at building a custom automated recipe generator failed spectacularly because it kept suggesting I pair fish with peanut butter. I was sitting there, staring at that error log, thinking, I gotta build something that requires less actual logic and more just organized chaos. Something simple, something daily, and something that people actually look at.
The Backstory: Why Just Virgo and Aquarius Love?
I wasn’t trying to become the next mystic or fortune teller. I promise. But I noticed something weird about all the massive astrology sites. They cover everything—career, health, money, general luck—and they spread their focus so thin that the advice is useless. The love section? Always the same bland nonsense: “Be open to opportunities” or “Communication is key.” I wanted something specific, something that felt like it was reading my mind, or at least the minds of people I knew.
My entire circle, for some reason, is dominated by these two signs. My spouse is a total Virgo. My best client? Aquarius. I spent so much time reading their daily forecasts trying to figure out how to interact with them that I realized I was doing all the work for the sites. That niche—hyper-specific daily love advice for just a couple of signs—was wide open. I figured, if I can nail just the relationship angle for these two, I might get a loyal following who are as obsessed as I used to be.
Starting the Engine: How I Built the Prediction Machine
Forget complex machine learning or paying for expensive APIs. My goal was speed and zero cost. I decided I would just organize pre-written content efficiently and rely on structured randomness. It sounds like cheating, but it’s just smart resource management.
I spent maybe five days just hoovering up publicly available astrological interpretations. I wasn’t trying to understand the math of planetary movement; I just wanted the resulting human emotion. I dumped everything into a single, massive spreadsheet. Why Sheets? Because it’s free and I can access it anywhere, which is crucial when I’m trying to make a quick update while waiting for my coffee.
The actual process involved these messy steps:
- Phase 1: Defining the Core Themes. I grabbed maybe 400 unique sentences. These were short, punchy, and relationship-focused. Examples: “A misunderstanding over a small purchase needs immediate resolution,” or “Expect a sudden influx of emotional clarity, don’t ignore it.”
- Phase 2: Creating a Tag System. This was the real work. I manually tagged every single sentence. Tags were simple: VIRGO-ACTION, AQUARIUS-WARNING, LOVE-POSITIVE-FOCUS, CHALLENGE-DOMESTIC. I needed to make sure I had enough variety so the predictions didn’t repeat too often.
- Phase 3: Building the Daily Selector. I used a straightforward, basic Python script—nothing fancy, you could probably teach a teenager to write it. This script’s only job was to randomly select a set number of tags for each sign every morning. For example, it might select one VIRGO-ACTION tag and two VIRGO-FOCUS tags.
- Phase 4: Matching and Rendering. The script then matched the selected tags back to the full sentence library in the Sheet. It pulled the corresponding sentences, strung them together with some flowery introductory text, and spat out the finalized daily forecast HTML.
The Grinding Reality of Daily Content
My first attempts were a total comedy show. The system didn’t understand contradiction. One morning, the Virgo forecast would advise them to “Hold tightly to tradition,” and the next line would be “Break free from routine and embrace spontaneity.” Total disaster. I realized I had failed to implement exclusionary rules.
I had to go back through the entire Sheet—all 400 sentences—and add a second layer of tagging called “Incompatibles.” If a sentence was tagged with “HOLD TIGHTLY,” its incompatible tag would be “BREAK FREE.” The script now runs a quick check to ensure it doesn’t pick any incompatible sentences on the same day. That took two days of staring at screens, cursing loudly, but it fixed the main quality control issue.
Is it real astrology? Nah, probably not by a long shot. But the predictions are flowing daily, they are specific to the love lives of Virgos and Aquarians, and they are generating responses. People actually write in saying the advice hit home. It taught me that sometimes, the simplest, roughest implementation that addresses a hyper-specific need works better than spending thousands of hours building a complicated system nobody actually asked for. I grabbed simple tools, ignored the complex math, and just built the workflow. It’s clunky, but it gets the job done.
