Okay, so, I had this idea to make picking out a horror movie less of a pain. You know how it is, scrolling forever and still not sure what to watch? Yeah, I wanted to fix that. So, I got to work.
First off, I needed a bunch of horror movies. I figured the best way was to just scrape them off a website. I found this site that had a pretty decent list of horror flicks, nothing fancy but it did the job. I used this tool, some web scraper thing, to pull all the movie titles and their ratings. Took a bit of fiddling to get it right, but eventually, I had a nice, fat list.
Next, I had to figure out how to let people actually pick a movie from this list. I thought about a few ways to do it, but in the end, I decided to keep it simple. I made a basic webpage with a button that says “Pick a Movie”. You click it, and boom, it spits out a random horror movie from my list, along with its rating.
To make this happen, I used some JavaScript. I’m no expert, but I know enough to get by. I wrote a little script that picks a random movie from the list I scraped earlier. It then displays the movie title and rating on the webpage. It’s pretty barebones, but it works!
Here’s the thing. I did not make the UI. I just created something like a command line interface. But I can see the result and that is enough for me.
- The whole idea was to make a simple tool, and I think I did that.
- Sure, it’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it does what it’s supposed to do.
- It definitely beats scrolling through endless lists of movies.
- This was my first time scraping data from websites. It was a good experience.
I showed it to a couple of friends, and they thought it was pretty neat. They gave me some ideas on how to make it better, like adding filters for different subgenres or maybe even user reviews. I might get around to those eventually, but for now, I’m just happy I made something that works and that my buddies dig it.
I guess the biggest lesson I learned from this little project is that you don’t need to be a coding genius to make something useful. Just a bit of patience, some Googling, and a willingness to bang your head against the wall a few times. And hey, if I can do it, anyone can.
So yeah, that’s my horror movie picker story. Hope you found it somewhat interesting. If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions, feel free to hit me up. Always looking for ways to improve my stuff. Cheers!
