This whole Virgo Horoscope Keen Blog thing? It wasn’t some grand plan to be the next big astro-guru. It was pure, raw necessity. I needed a cash flow that wasn’t tied to some clown in an office who thought he owned my life. That’s the real story inside this monthly update.
I knew I couldn’t build a full-blown mega-site. Too slow. So, I zeroed in. Virgo. Why Virgo? No solid reason, honestly. Just seemed like a solid, stable audience who might actually click an ad. I decided to make it the fastest, ugliest, most efficient piece of junk I could possibly build that still delivered a monthly reading. Had to be set-it-and-forget-it, mostly.
The Start: Panic Deployment
First step, I
jumped on a cheap host and bought a god-awful domain name. Didn’t spend more than five minutes thinking about it. Grabbed a standard WordPress theme—the kind everyone uses—and threw it up. No fancy design. No custom anything. Just the bones. The key was automation.
I spent an entire Saturday morning figuring out how to slap together a simple Python script. No professional API keys. Nothing official. I just found a couple of free, maybe-not-entirely-legal RSS feeds and public data drops that spat out decent-sounding horoscope text. My script was designed to do two things:
- Crawl and Clean: It would chew up the raw text, strip out all the junk—the intros, the disclaimers, the terrible formatting—and leave just the pure, “Your Big Life Change Inside” meat.
- Schedule and Dump: It would pre-load the next six months’ worth of posts into the draft folder. Then, a simple cron job—which I wrestled with for hours, failing twice—was set to publish the new reading at 12:01 AM on the first day of every month. Non-stop, no matter what.
The whole build process was maybe 30 hours, spread over a week when I should have been sleeping. It was crude. It was held together with digital duct tape. But it worked. The traffic slowly, painfully, started to trickle in. Nothing huge. Enough for gas money, maybe lunch, just a trickle. And that trickle was my life raft.
The Real Reason: The Dumpster Fire Job
Why did I bother with this quick-and-dirty automation nightmare? Because my actual job, the one paying the bills, had turned into a toxic, festering dumpster fire.
I was working as an engineer in a big corporation. Things were fine until the new VP, who thought he was a genius but mostly just read management books, decided to clean house. He wasn’t firing people for incompetence. He was firing people for not agreeing with him. I was always the guy who pushed back on the stupid ideas. That was my mistake.
One Tuesday morning, he called me into a meeting. Not for a review. No performance issues. He just looked at me and said, “We need to go in a different direction.” Translation: “I don’t like your face.” I shook his hand, grabbed my box of desk junk, and walked out. But here’s the kicker, the part that makes my blood boil even now:
They didn’t just fire me. They froze my final paycheck. They used some made-up nonsense about unreturned equipment—a fifteen-year-old monitor I never even used—to justify holding my money hostage. My family had just moved, we had major bills, and suddenly, my savings account was draining like a bathtub with the plug pulled.
I spent three solid weeks fighting with their terrible HR department. Phone calls got ignored. Emails bounced. I felt invisible. I was holding a signed termination letter, but in their system, I was a phantom.
It was during this time, staring at zero bank balance growth, that I slammed the Virgo blog together. It wasn’t about horoscopes. It was about creating a tiny, independent machine that no HR department could ever freeze. A passive income stream, even if it was just $50 a month, that was entirely mine.
The Aftermath: The Ghost Offer
Funny thing is, once the blog had run for about four months, and my old company saw they couldn’t blackmail me with my final pay—I had already gotten a lawyer involved, and they caved—the VP calls me.
He was like, “Hey, we’re having some trouble with the projects you were running. We see you’re still doing development stuff. How about you come back as a consultant? We’ll pay you double your old rate.”
I laughed so hard my dog looked at me funny. Consultant? You held my livelihood hostage and now you want me to save your skin? I told him exactly where he could stick his “consultant” offer and then hit the block button.
That little Virgo site? It’s still running. It still posts every first of the month. It’s not paying the mortgage, but it’s a constant, small reminder that I built my own safety net. That’s the real big life change. Stability isn’t given to you by a corporation; you have to automate it yourself.
