Alright, so you’re asking about that ‘weasle mma’ setup I cobbled together. Let me tell you, it wasn’t some grand, well-thought-out architecture. Far from it. It was more of a “what can I get running by tonight?” kind of deal, born out of sheer frustration, really.
Getting Started – The Why and How
See, I was trying to keep track of some local MMA scene stuff, fight results, who’s fighting who, that sort of thing. And there was nothing good out there. Just scattered bits on old forums, clunky social media posts, you know the drill. So, I figured, how hard can it be to just pull it all into one place?
Famous last words, right? That’s where the ‘weasle’ part of ‘weasle mma’ came in. Because the whole process of getting the info felt like chasing a weasel – quick, unpredictable, and always slipping through your fingers.
My first bright idea was, okay, I’ll just manually check a few websites every day and pop it into a spreadsheet. That lasted about two days. Too much work. I’m fundamentally lazy when it comes to repetitive stuff.
The “Build” Process – If You Can Call It That
So, I thought, I know a tiny bit of scripting. Let’s try to automate this mess. This is where the real “fun” began. My practice went something like this:
- Finding Sources: First, I had to pinpoint where this info even lived. This was a nightmare. Half the gym websites looked like they were made in 1998 and never updated. Event pages? Vanished after the event.
- Grabbing the Data: Then, actually getting the data. I started with some super basic Python scripts. Trying to pull text from web pages. Most of the time, the page structures would change, and my scripts would just keel over and die. I spent more time fixing them than gathering new info. It wasn’t elegant web scraping; it was more like digital dumpster diving.
- The “MMA” of Data: Wrestling the data into shape, that was the real MMA match. One site would say “John ‘The Mauler’ Doe,” another just “J. Doe.” Dates were in different formats, results were vague – “Win by stoppage.” Stoppage how? Doctor? Corner? Ref? Who knew! It was a constant battle to make it even remotely consistent. I had so many nested ‘if-else’ statements, my code looked like a tangled fishing line.
- Storing the “Gold”: Database? Nah, too complicated for what I was doing back then. It all went into text files. Yeah, you heard me. Plain old .txt files. Searching through that later was… an adventure.
- Making it “Usable”: Finally, I rigged up a super simple HTML page that would just read these text files and spit out some tables. I had to manually trigger the scripts, then manually refresh the page. High tech, I tell ya.
What Came Out of It
And believe it or not, it sort of worked. For a while. It was ugly, clunky, and broke if you looked at it funny, but it gave me the info I wanted, most of the time. It was my own little ‘weasle mma’ system. It did its job, in its own peculiar, weasely way.
The biggest takeaway? Sometimes you just gotta dive in and make a mess. You learn a ton from those scrappy projects. You learn what doesn’t work real fast. And you learn that sometimes, “good enough” is actually pretty good when you’re the only one using it and it solves your immediate problem.
Looking back, it was a Rube Goldberg machine of code. But hey, that’s how these things often start, isn’t it? You don’t always begin with a perfect plan. You start with a problem, a bit of curiosity, and you just… build. Or in my case, you weasel something together.
