Alright, let me tell you about my little adventure with “hillgrove baseball.” It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but hey, who expects that in coding, right?
It all started when I decided I wanted to, well, build something kinda cool. I had this idea for a simple webpage, you know, just displaying some basic info. I thought, “Hey, why not use some baseball data?” Hillgrove High’s baseball team popped into my head – figured it would be a fun, local kinda thing.
First things first, I scraped the data. Yep, got my hands dirty right away. Used some basic Python with Beautiful Soup. It wasn’t the prettiest code, lemme tell ya. There were a lot of `try` and `except` blocks because the website I was pulling from was… let’s just say “unpredictable.” Spent a good chunk of the afternoon cleaning it up. Removing all the weird characters, empty entries, that kinda stuff. Ugh.
Then, I organized the data into a simple CSV file. I know, I know, a database would have been way better, but I was just trying to keep it simple for now. Each row was a player, and the columns were their stats: name, number, position, batting average, all that jazz.
Next, I fired up my HTML editor – good ol’ VS Code. I created a basic HTML structure, linked a CSS stylesheet (for some style, at least), and started populating the table. I used Javascript to dynamically read the CSV data and inject it into the table. This part was a little tricky because of CORS. Had to mess around with some settings to allow the script to access the local file.
Styled the page. Kept it real simple, nothing fancy. Some basic colors, fonts, and spacing. Didn’t want to overdo it. I’m no designer!
Then tested it. Of course, it didn’t work perfectly the first time. A couple of typos in the Javascript, some CSS issues with the table layout. Fiddled around with it until it looked… okay. Not great, but okay.
Finally, deployed it. Just threw it up on Netlify. Free hosting, can’t beat that.
So, there you have it. My “hillgrove baseball” project. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it was a fun little exercise. I learned a few things, got some practice with web scraping and basic front-end development. And who knows, maybe someone from the team will stumble across it one day!
Lessons Learned:
- Data cleaning is always more work than you think.
- CORS is a pain.
- Simple is good (at least for me!).
