Okay, here’s my attempt at a blog post, mimicking the style you described:
Title: January 31 Birthdays – My Python Shenanigans
Alright, so I had this silly idea the other day – I wanted to see who famous shares my birthday, January 31st. Seemed like a fun little coding project, right? Turns out, getting a list of famous birthdays isn’t as easy as you’d think.
First, I thought, “Wikipedia! Obvious choice!” So, I fired up my browser and went straight there. I searched for “January 31” and scrolled down to the “Births” section. Boom! A whole list. But, copying and pasting that whole thing? No way, that’s for chumps.
Time to break out Python. I whipped up a quick script using `requests` and `BeautifulSoup`. I grabbed the HTML from the Wikipedia page, and started digging through it with BeautifulSoup. Man, Wikipedia’s HTML is a mess!
It took a while to figure out the right tags and classes to target, but eventually, I managed to extract the list of names from the “Births” section. I cleaned up the data a bit, removing the extra parentheses and links and stuff.
Next problem: just because someone’s on Wikipedia doesn’t mean they’re famous. I needed some way to filter this list. I initially thought about trying to use some kind of popularity score, but that seemed like a whole ‘nother project in itself.
So, I took a shortcut. I decided to only include people who had a description of more than, say, 20 words after their name on the Wikipedia page. It’s not perfect, but it helped to filter out some of the less-known folks. It’s a crude way to do it, I know, but hey, it’s my birthday, not a scientific research project!
After running the script, I got a list. Not a bad list, actually! I saw Justin Timberlake, Kerry Washington, and a few other people I recognized. That was pretty cool.
But the really fun part? I realized I could modify the script to look up any date. So, I started messing around, checking the birthdays of my friends and family.
Then I got really ambitious. I decided to build a little web app using Flask so I could easily enter any date and get the list of “famous” birthdays.
It took a few hours of tinkering, but I finally got it working. It’s super basic – just a single page with a form where you can enter the month and day. But it works, and it’s kinda neat!
I even added a little error handling to catch invalid dates and stuff. Not gonna lie, I felt pretty good about myself after that.
The code is ugly as sin and I probably broke every best practice in the book, but it was a fun way to spend an afternoon and learn a few things. Plus, now I have a silly little web app that can tell me who I share a birthday with.
So, yeah, that’s the story of my January 31st birthday coding adventure. Pretty dumb, but hey, it was fun! Maybe I’ll clean up the code and put it up on GitHub someday. Or maybe not. Who knows?
