Alright, so I ended up building this astrology bot, not because I’m some huge believer or anything, but more out of, well, let’s call it ‘social necessity’. My friends, bless ’em, are super into their daily horoscopes. Every single morning in the group chat, it’d be “What’s the outlook for Pisces?” or “Anyone check Leo’s forecast?” It was a lot, you know? So, I thought, maybe I can just make a little something to automate this whole circus.
Getting My Hands on the Star Signs
First off, I had to figure out where to actually get the horoscope texts. I wasn’t about to type them out daily! I poked around, looking for some easy, free way to grab them. A lot of sites were super flashy, full of ads, or wanted you to sign up for stuff. Nope, not for me. I needed something simple. I did try my hand at web scraping. Watched a few tutorials, felt like a proper hacker for about five minutes. I got a script working with Python – because everyone says Python is the easy one, right? – and it pulled data from one site pretty well. For a day. Then they changed their website layout. Boom. My scraper was toast. That happened a couple of times, actually. Super annoying when you think you’ve cracked it, and then it just breaks.
Eventually, I found this really plain, no-nonsense website. It just had the horoscopes, clean and simple. I tweaked my scraping script to be less ambitious, just looking for very specific bits of the page, and that one has been chugging along okay, mostly.
Turning Text into a “Bot”
Okay, so now I could grab the daily words of wisdom. What next? I needed a way for my friends to ask for their sign without me being involved. I’d messed about with Discord bots a tiny bit before, for some gaming stuff, so that felt like the path of least resistance. I found a decent Python library for Discord bots – kept things in one language, which was nice.
The basic plan was:
- Get the bot to listen for a command, something like “!astro taurus”.
- When it sees that, it runs my little scraper for “Taurus”.
- Then it just dumps the text it found back into the chat.
Sounds easy when I say it like that, but man, there was a lot of fiddling. Getting the bot to actually connect to Discord, making sure it didn’t just die if the horoscope website was slow or if someone typed a weird command. I remember one evening, I spent hours because the darn thing would only give the Aries horoscope, no matter what sign you asked for. Turned out I’d made a really dumb mistake, copied a line of code wrong. It’s always the small stuff that gets you.
A Bit of Background on Why I Even Bothered
You might be wondering why I’d spend my time on this. Well, truth is, this whole astrology bot thing started when I had a bit of unexpected free time. My old job decided to do one of those “organizational realignments” – yeah, you know the drill. So, I was suddenly job hunting. And instead of just doomscrolling employment sites 24/7, I needed a project. Something to keep my brain from turning to mush. This little bot idea just popped up. It was either this or finally cleaning out the garage, and frankly, coding, even frustrating coding, seemed like more fun.
So, there you have it. The bot’s been quietly doing its thing in our Discord for a while now. It’s not fancy. It breaks now and then if the website I’m scraping from changes a pixel. But, for the most part, it works. My friends get their horoscopes, and I learned a fair bit about how fiddly web scraping can be and how to get a simple bot up and running. It’s funny how these small, almost silly projects can end up teaching you a thing or two. Plus, it made our group chat slightly less predictable in the mornings, and that alone felt like a win.