Okay, so today I decided to mess around with getting my daily horoscope using Astro, Velida, and Netlify. It sounded kinda cool and techy, so I figured, why not? Here’s how it all went down.
First Steps: Setting Up Astro
First, I had to get Astro up and running. I’ve played with it a bit before, so this wasn’t totally new territory. I just opened up my terminal and typed in the command to create a new Astro project. I always forget the exact command, but I found the install command, and that got the ball rolling. It asked me a few questions about how I wanted to set things up – I just went with the defaults, mostly.
Finding a Horoscope Source (Velida)
Next up, I needed a way to actually get the horoscope data. I knew I didn’t want to write some complicated thing to scrape websites, so I looked for an API. I’d heard of Velida somewhere (or at least that how I feel in my memory.), so I wanted to see If there is a public API or something I can use. I found the relevent information. Bingo!
Coding It Up
Now for the fun part – actually writing some code! I created a new component in Astro. I created a new .astro file in the component *, I used the fetch API. I think it’s built into Astro, or maybe it’s just a JavaScript thing, I always forget. Anyway, I used `fetch` to grab data from the Velida API endpoint.
I had to play around with the API a bit to figure out exactly how to ask for what I wanted, It took me five or six tried to put right request format. I wanted to get today’s horoscope for my sign, you know? Eventually, I got it returning a nice little chunk of JSON with the horoscope text.
Then, it was just a matter of displaying that text in my component. I used some simple HTML to show the date and the horoscope. Nothing fancy, just a paragraph tag.
Getting it Online (Netlify)
Just having this on my computer is boring, right? I wanted to be able to see it anywhere. So, I used Netlify. I’ve used them before, and they’re super easy for this kind of thing.
I connected my project to my account. Then, I pushed my code up, I clicked the button to build and deploy my site. It took a few minutes, but Netlify did its thing, and bam! My daily horoscope was live on the internet.
The Result
It’s not going to win any design awards, that’s for sure. But, it works! Every day, I can go to that little website I made, and there’s my horoscope, fresh from the internet. It’s kind of silly, but it was a fun little project, and I learned a few things along the way. Might try adding some styling later, or maybe even let you pick your own sign. Who knows!
