Alright, let me walk you through how I tackled this whole “blazers live score” thing. It was a bit of a journey, lemme tell ya.
First off, I started by just thinking about what I actually wanted. I mean, I needed to grab the live score of the Portland Trail Blazers, right? Seemed simple enough. So, I jumped onto Google and started searching for APIs that might give me that data. Found a few, some were free, some needed a subscription. I ended up messing around with a couple of the free ones to see what kind of data they kicked back. This was key, because some APIs look great on paper, but the data is a mess.
After playing around with those APIs, I figured I’d need some code to actually pull the data and display it. I decided to use Python, because, well, I’m most comfortable with it. I used the requests library to hit the API endpoints and grab the JSON data. Then, I used json to parse that data into something usable. This is where it got a little tricky. The API data wasn’t always structured the way I expected, so I had to do some digging and figure out the right keys to access the score.
Here’s a snippet of what that looked like:
import requestsimport jsonurl = "some_api_url_here"response = *(url)data = *(*)blazers_score = data['scoreboard']['teams']['blazers']['score'] #This part changes a lot depending on the API
Once I had the score, I needed a way to display it. I could have just printed it to the console, but that’s boring. So, I decided to use a simple HTML page with some JavaScript to update the score in real-time. I set up a basic HTML page with a div to hold the score. Then, I wrote some JavaScript to fetch the score from my Python script (which I set up as a simple API endpoint using Flask) and update the div every few seconds.
Here’s the basic HTML:
<div id="blazers-score"></div>
And the JavaScript (simplified):
function getScore() {fetch('/score') // Assuming Flask endpoint.then(response => *()).then(score => {*('blazers-score').innerText = score;setInterval(getScore, 5000); // Update every 5 seconds
The Flask part was pretty straightforward. I created a route that would execute the Python code to grab the score from the API and return it as plain text.
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
@*('/score')
def get_blazers_score():
# API call logic here to get blazers_score variable
return str(blazers_score)
if __name__ == '__main__':
*(debug=True)
Of course, there were a ton of little problems along the way. The API would sometimes go down, the data format would change unexpectedly, and I’d have to debug my code. But that’s just part of the process, right?
The End Result
In the end, I had a simple webpage that would display the Blazers’ live score, updating every few seconds. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked! And that’s what mattered. Plus, I learned a ton about APIs, web development, and debugging in the process.
If I were to do it again, I might look into using a more robust framework for the front-end, like React or *. But for a quick and dirty project, this worked just fine.
