Alright folks, let’s get into how I actually built this thing to track UTPB Football stuff. Got tired of bouncing between the school site, conference pages, and social media, ya know? Just wanted one simple place. Figured I’d share the messy journey.
Starting Point: Pure Annoyance
First off, the info was scattered all over the damn place. Game times? Official athletics site had it… sometimes. Scores? Sometimes the conference Twitter posted faster. Stats? Buried in PDFs. Drove me nuts. Needed a central spot.
So, I grabbed my laptop. Thought, maybe I can automate some of this.
Figuring Out the Sources
- 1. Scouted the Web: Made a list: UTPB Athletics website, the Lone Star Conference standings page, their main Twitter feed, couple of local sports reporter accounts that always post highlights.
- 2. Realized the Headache: Each spot used completely different setups. School site was all dynamic. Conference page? Old-school HTML table. Twitter? Well, Twitter’s its own beast.
Did some Googling. Felt like digging a hole with a spoon. Didn’t wanna pay for some fancy sports API, just needed UTPB specifics.
Getting My Hands Dirty
- 3. Picked a Tool: Settled on Python. Heard it was decent for grabbing web stuff. Found this thing called Beautiful Soup for the conference standings and game schedules on the LSC page. Wrote a little script to scrape it.
- 4>First Blood (& Headaches): Got it working… sometimes. Site changed their code once and my whole thing broke. Spent hours fixing it. Then realized some dates got screwed up because of timezones. Facepalm moment.
- 5. Twitter Trouble: That was harder. Twitter makes you jump through hoops now. Used Tweepy but had to mess with API keys and rules about how often I could ask for new tweets. Filtered for posts with UTPB Football keywords and from specific accounts. Still worried they’ll cut me off.
The Guts of It
- 6. Storage: Needed somewhere to stick all this info. Made a simple database. Just shoved scores, dates, links to recaps into tables. Kept it real basic.
- 7. Making It Look Like Something: This part kinda sucked. Hate fancy UIs. Just wanted simple text updates. Wrote a second script to pull the latest stuff from the DB and spit it out onto a super simple webpage I host myself. Made sure it showed the game yesterday and the next game coming up. Added a clear timestamp so folks knew when it was last updated.
The Never-Ending Tinkering
Got it running. Felt pretty damn good to see the scores show up semi-automatically last Saturday.
But let’s be real:
- Still breaks if the website changes its layout.
- Twitter sometimes misses a crucial update.
- Had to add extra checks because twice a game got listed twice with different start times.
- Parsing the opponent names was a nightmare – team pages sometimes use abbreviations, sometimes full names. Ended up making a lookup table.
It’s usable now, mostly. Don’t trust it fully. Still check manually. It’s my Frankenstein’s monster, but at least I built it. Saves me some hassle, and maybe helps a fan or two. Definitely taught me patience! Might try adding stats next… that sounds painful already.
