So, you know how sometimes you just get tired of doing the same thing over and over? That was me, checking Marjorie Orr’s Pisces weekly forecast. Every single week. I’d go to the site, hunt around, scroll down, find Pisces, and read it. It wasn’t a huge deal, but man, it felt like a chore after a while. I kept thinking, “There’s gotta be a simpler way to just get this thing in my face without all the fuss.”
It all started, I guess, because I’m a Pisces, and I kinda dig knowing what the stars might be up to. A buddy of mine, also a Pisces, was always asking me if I’d seen the forecast yet. So I’d text him the highlights. That’s when the lightbulb really went off. This wasn’t just a “me” problem. Other folks were probably doing the exact same dance.
My first move was pretty basic. I just bookmarked the page. That saved me a few clicks, sure, but it didn’t get rid of the whole hunting-and-scrolling thing. Then I tried just copying the text into a note on my phone and sending it to my buddy. Super manual. Super clunky. I did that for a couple of months. Every Monday morning, same routine. Read, copy, paste, send. My thumbs were getting a workout, but my brain was telling me this was dumb.
The “No More Manual” Mission
I decided enough was enough. I needed a system. I wasn’t a coding whiz or anything, but I knew my way around a computer well enough to poke at things. My first thought was, “Can I just set something up to grab that text for me?”
I remembered messing around with some simple scripts ages ago. So I dug out an old Python book. Man, that was a trip down memory lane. I started just trying to fetch the whole webpage. That was easy enough. But then, it was like drinking from a firehose – just a ton of raw HTML. I didn’t want all that. I just wanted the Pisces part.
This is where I hit my first real wall. How do you tell a program to just find “Pisces” and then get everything under it until the next sign? I spent a few evenings staring at the page’s source code, trying to see if there was some pattern, some unique tag around the Pisces section. It was like a treasure hunt, but with really boring treasure. Eventually, I spotted it. There was usually a `
` tag for each sign. Bingo!
So, I started piecing together a little script. It felt like building with LEGOs, honestly. Fetch the page, find that specific `
` for Pisces, and then grab all the text until it hit another `
` or the end of the section. It wasn’t perfect, sometimes it grabbed too much, sometimes too little, but I kept tweaking it. It involved a lot of trial and error, running the script, looking at the output, changing a line, running it again. My screen was full of messy text outputs, but I was slowly getting there.
Getting It to Deliver
Getting It to Deliver
Once I could consistently pull the right text, the next step was to get it to me and my buddy without me having to kick it off every week. This felt like the “set it and forget it” part I was really after.
I thought about a few ways to share it:
- Email: Seemed simple enough. Just email the text.
- A simple webpage: Maybe a super basic page that just displayed it.
- A chat message: My buddy and I used a specific chat app, so maybe a bot?
I started with email because that seemed the most straightforward. I found some simple Python libraries that could send emails. My script now did three things: grab the forecast, format it nicely, and then shoot it off to me and my buddy. It was pretty neat. The emails were plain text, no fancy stuff, but they had the forecast, clear as day.
Then came the automation part. I don’t run a server or anything serious, but I remembered you could set up tasks on your home computer to run at certain times. I figured out how to use something called ‘cron’ on an old Raspberry Pi I had gathering dust. It was a bit of a head-scratcher to get the syntax right for scheduling, but once I locked it in, every Monday morning at 8 AM, like clockwork, that Pi would wake up, run my script, and send us the forecast.
For a while, that was it. It worked. It was awesome. No more manual checks. No more forgetting. Just a simple email in my inbox every Monday.
The Evolution of a Simple Idea
But you know how it goes. Once you get one thing working, you start thinking, “What else can I do?”
I started noticing that sometimes the website structure would change a tiny bit, and my script would get confused. I had to go in and adjust it. It wasn’t a huge deal, but it was a bit annoying. So, I tried to make the script a bit smarter, a bit more flexible in how it found the text, using some more robust patterns instead of just relying on exact headings.
I also decided to clean up the output a bit. Sometimes there was extra whitespace or weird characters. I added a few lines to strip those out, making the final forecast email look much cleaner and easier to read. It was satisfying to polish something up like that.
The whole journey taught me a bunch. It started with a simple annoyance and turned into a fun little project. I dusted off some old coding skills, learned a few new tricks with scheduling, and most importantly, I built something that genuinely saved me a tiny bit of hassle every week. It’s not rocket science, just a bit of elbow grease and poking around, but it feels good to have that little system humming along in the background. My buddy still thanks me every Monday for the “star intel.” And that’s a win in my book.
