This whole ridiculous project, this automatic horoscope grabber, started because I got tired of forgetting to check my damn love forecast before a date. Seriously. You miss one critical celestial warning about mercury being retrograde or whatever, and suddenly you’re stuck buying drinks for someone who only talks about their crypto portfolio. I just wanted the warning delivered to me, straight up, every day, every week, and the start of every month. I’m a Pisces, and frankly, we need all the help we can get with matters of the heart.
So, I decided to build a system. Not some fancy app, just a greasy little script that did the job. No more manual searching through those garbage heap astrology sites full of pop-ups and endless scrolling. I needed automation.
Hunting Down the Damn Data Source
The first hurdle was the data itself. You’d think in 2024, there would be a clean, simple API that just spits out “Pisces Love Life Today.” Nope. I dug through maybe ten different providers. Most of them wanted $50 a month for vague general readings. Toss that noise out.
I spent three solid days hunting for a free, reliable source. I signed up for a couple of those “free trial” astrology sites, hoping they had a hidden feed. They did not. They just instantly started emailing me about chakra cleansings. Blocked them all.
Finally, I landed on a specific, super consistent blog run by this woman who updates her Pisces section like clockwork. The HTML structure of her site is old, ugly, but reliable. That’s all I needed. I realized I had to settle on scraping that one specific page. It felt dirty, but hey, I needed to know if I was going to meet my soulmate or just another time-waster.
Rigging Up the Fetching Machine
I didn’t want to spin up a huge Java application for this. That’s overkill. I opted for the path of least resistance: Python. It’s what I know, and it handles scraping requests without much fuss. I wrote a quick, messy scraper script. It had three main jobs:
- Go to the blog URL.
- Look specifically for the H3 tag that said “Pisces Love Destiny.”
- Grab the next two paragraphs of text and ignore all the ads around it.
This script had to be fast. If I was going to check this thing multiple times, it couldn’t be slow. I tested the damn thing about twenty times just making sure I only grabbed the love advice, nothing about career or money. That stuff can wait.
Then, where to run it? I pulled out an old, dusty Linode VPS I had been using for some forgotten Minecraft server. It was already running Linux, so I set up a simple crontab job. Cheap, reliable, and I never have to touch it again.
Building the Time Machine: Daily, Weekly, Monthly Checks
The core challenge was frequency. Daily, weekly, monthly. I couldn’t just run the same script 365 days a year; I needed logic embedded in the crontab and the Python file itself. I defined the logic clearly, using the current date and time to choose which scraper function to execute.
The crontab looked something like this (though I won’t write out the confusing schedule code):
Daily Check:
I scheduled the script to run every morning at 7:05 AM. It checks the blog for the “Today” reading. If it finds it, great. If not, it just keeps the last reading. That’s my essential morning routine now.
Weekly Check (The Big Picture):
This one was tricky. I told the script to only execute the “weekly” scrape on Monday mornings at 7:10 AM. It had to confirm that the astrologer had uploaded the new weekly post. This usually means the script is looking for a phrase like “Week of [Date]” instead of “Today.” I set up a specific identifier tag to make sure I wasn’t just pulling the daily reading again.
Monthly Check (The Long Haul):
This is the serious stuff. What’s the whole month look like? I set up a special, deeper scraping function that only runs on the first day of the month at 7:15 AM. The astrologer posts a massive, general overview then. This scrape had to be more robust because the monthly posts had way more padding and photos around the important love sections. I coded it to look for specific keywords like “Commitment,” “New Romance,” and “Partnership” and pull out those three key paragraphs.
Getting the Update Sent Out
I considered email, but my inbox is a nightmare. I considered text messaging, but I’m not paying for every API call. I decided on Telegram. It’s free, instant, and I can set up a private channel where only I can see the updates.
I configured a basic Telegram bot token, which was surprisingly easy. The final step of the Python script wasn’t to print the result to the console, but to push the cleaned, formatted text straight to my private Telegram channel. I even threw a little emoji in front of each reading—a red heart for daily, a kissing face for weekly, and a crystal ball for monthly.
So now, every morning, my phone dings three times in rapid succession: Daily fate, Weekly outlook, and if it’s the first of the month, the Monthly warning. It’s glorious. My love life isn’t instantly fixed—astrology isn’t magic—but I save about ten minutes of anxious scrolling a day, and I never, ever miss a warning about bad romantic decisions. This whole jury-rigged automation gave me back my peace of mind, which, for a sensitive Pisces, is a huge win.
