Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
The beginning of this week was exciting in many ways. To begin with, I was given the opportunity to meet the Governor of Pennsylvania. He had come to visit one of our district's elementary schools to rally support for additional funding for schools. I got to follow his tour through the school, shake his hand, and even have a conversation with him about what I do with regards to technology in the high school and the rest of the district.
After the Governor had given an interview with our local news station and left the building, I sat down with my mentor to work on the issue of the athletic calendar. As I described the problems I had been facing in the previous week, he and I looked at the site that houses the calendar. I explained the problem with using the URL that Chrome's Developer Tools had led me to and my mentor simply pressed a different button than I had and it worked. This was, of course, a little frazzling because of the amount of time I had spent scouring the internet for answers when my original idea would have worked, but it was also very exciting. The problem had been that the URL given in Developer Tools had an extra path at the end of it that was unnecessary and would not lead me to the actual site. By opening the URL in a new window, the correct URL was used and could be collected. So, now my job should be a lot simpler than it was going to be.
On Wednesday, I began to implement the solution that we had discovered the day before. I scraped the URL we had found pretty simply, and then just had to find a way to properly parse the information I had found. This would not have been too difficult if I had been familiar with Python, the language we're using to work with scraping and the database. However, after a brief conversation with Google, I found the correct syntax for what I was trying to do. By the end of the day, I had information uploading to the database. The only problem was that not all of the information I wanted was being uploaded. It turns out that for some reason, not all of the tags that I was searching for were being recognized. I found that part of the problem was that some of the words I was searching for were used in multiple pieces of information. For example, one thing I wanted to upload was the "FACILITY". However, there are also sections for "FACILITY_ID", "FACILITY_CITY" etc. So, I just checked to make sure that each section included "FACILITY", but not a hyphen and that worked well. The other problem is yet to be solved. Some of the tags have no reason to not be recognized. The one that I noticed first was "SPORT". There are other sections that include "SPORT", like "TRANSPORT" and "SPORT_ID", but when I printed out every section that got through the if statement ensuring that the section included "SPORT", none of the ones that I actually wanted made it through. So, apparently "SPORT" does not include "SPORT" in it.
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