Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea for a “court sports network” thing, and I wanted to share my little journey so far. It’s been a bit all over the place, but hey, that’s how these things go, right?
I started out, like, super basic. I just wanted to see if I could even get some data, you know? So, I fired up my trusty old code editor – nothing fancy, just something to write some quick and dirty scripts.
My first move was to try and grab some schedules. I mean, you can’t have a sports network without knowing when the games are on, am I right? So, I started poking around, trying to find websites that listed game times for local basketball and tennis courts. I figured those would be the easiest to start with.
It was… messy. Some sites had pretty clean schedules, others were like a digital maze. I ended up writing a bunch of different little scripts to handle each site’s… “uniqueness”.
- Scraping attempt #1: Total fail. The website used some weird dynamic loading thing, and my basic script just came up empty.
- Scraping attempt #2: Slightly better! I got some data, but it was all jumbled up and needed a ton of cleaning.
- Scraping attempt #3: Finally! A site with a reasonably well-structured schedule. I felt like a coding ninja.
After, cleaning, sorting.I took a whole afternoon to manually put information, line by line,into one file.
Then, I tried to do something, you know, useful with the data. Like a simple webpage that could display games happening within a certain area. I decided that It was a good idea to display the info on my old, persona blog.
Displaying the Mess
I didn’t try to do anything fancy with, like, maps or live updates or whatever. Just a plain old table with dates, times, and locations. I’m no design wizard, so I kept the layout super simple. The goal was just to prove that I could take that messy data I’d scraped and turn it into something slightly less messy.
The result? It worked! Okay, “worked” might be a strong word. It functioned. It showed a list of games, and it was… readable. Kinda. My blog is old and I’m still adjusting.
So, that’s where I’m at. It’s a super rough, super early prototype of this “court sports network” idea. Plenty of stuff to figure out still, like, getting more reliable data, making it look less like a spreadsheet from the 90s, and actually, you know, making it useful to people. I’m learning as I * it will help * knows.
Anyway,I will try to explore more about making live scores.
