by Alright folks, buckle up. Today’s experiment was something I’ve been noodling around with for a minute – building a personal horoscope scraper for July 25th. Yeah, I know, sounds kinda basic, but trust me, it turned into a proper mess. Here’s how it all went down.
Starting Simple (Or So I Thought)
First thing Tuesday morning, I cracked open the laptop feeling kinda optimistic. Grabbed a mug of coffee – black, no sugar – and jumped straight in. Thought: “How hard could it be to pull some daily zodiac predictions?” Figured I’d write a quick script.
Found this free astrology API somebody mentioned in a forum. Copied the docs URL, pasted it into my code editor. Hammered out some Python using the requests library. Basic stuff, right?
- Imported requests
- Set the API endpoint URL
- Defined parameters like “sign=aries” and “day=july-25”
- Added a simple print statement to spit out the prediction text
Hit run. Boom. Straight into a brick wall – 404 error. API endpoint gone cold. Shoulda known better than trusting free stuff.
The Scraping Detour
Plan B kicked in around noon. Scraping. Picked a popular horoscope site, inspected the page – saw the predictions wrapped in these div tags with a class like “.daily-horoscope-content”. Perfect.
Slapped together BeautifulSoup and requests again. Wrote a for-loop to grab the content for all 12 signs one by one. Ran it… and got slapped with Cloudflare protection. Site booted me like a bouncer tossing out troublemakers.
Panic mode activated. Started sweating bullets trying different things:
- Added headers trying to fake a browser (User-Agent? Yeah, tossed that in)
- Slowed down the requests with *(5)
- Cookies? Tried grabbing some manually… lasted about 3 seconds before another block
The Dumb Middle Part
Frustration level: HIGH. After lunch – more cold coffee – I had this dumb idea. Went to the site manually in Chrome. Copied the damn predictions for all 12 signs into a text file. Yeah, by hand. Took me 20 minutes, feeling like an absolute goofball.
Wrote another script just to read this text file and print the prediction based on a command line argument for the sign. Felt so… manual. So pointless. But hey, it technically “worked”. Ran it:
python fake_* --sign cancer
Printed out Cancer’s prediction for July 25th. “Something about home and family, be cautious” blah blah. Generic. Probably wrong.
What Actually Happened
Told my buddy Dave (he’s a Taurus) his prediction. He laughed. “Nah mate, my Monday was rubbish, this says today’s ‘financially blessed’.” Checked his bank app. Rent bounced. Yup. Total fail.
Wasted hours. Learned almost nothing useful except maybe don’t rely on free APIs and modern websites hate scrapers. Ended up with a useless text file and a clunky script that just plays back whatever I typed.
So yeah. That was my Tuesday experiment. Feels more like a cautionary tale than a success story. Sometimes the simplest ideas turn into the biggest time sinks. Probably just gonna read the newspaper horoscopes tomorrow like a normal person.
