By arlington Man, trying to keep up with the Israeli Premier League was driving me nuts. Every time I wanted the latest standings, I’d click through five different pages full of gambling ads before finding the damn table. Felt like running through mud just to see who’s topping the league. So last Tuesday, I decided to build my own quick-access tool.
Started by messing around with my browser’s inspect tool on footy sites. Realized most league tables lived inside these things called <div class=”standings”> tags. Grabbed some free screen scraping script online – tweaked it to hunt specifically for that HTML class. First test pulled random gibberish because the script choked on Hebrew characters.
Added this clunky fix where it converts everything to UTF-8 before processing. Worked after three failed tries and two coffee breaks. Now my script would output raw data that looked like:
- Hapoel Be’er Sheva 8 5 1 2 16pts
- Maccabi Tel Aviv 8 4 3 1 15pts
Still sucked needing to manually run the script though. Wanted one-click access. Remembered my Raspberry Pi collecting dust in the closet. Set up a cron job to make it scrape daily at 7AM Jerusalem time.
Final piece? Made a dead simple Python Flask page with just two elements: big bold “ISRAELI PREMIER LEAGUE” header on top, standings dumped right below in Courier font. No images, no menus, definitely no pop-ups. Felt so damn satisfying pressing F5 and seeing fresh standings load faster than I can blink.
