Okay, let me tell you about this little thing I worked on, I just called it the ‘champions ball’ idea in my head. It wasn’t anything massive, just something I tinkered with.
How it Started
It really just popped into my head one evening. I was thinking about football, specifically the big European cup, you know? The Champions League. And I got curious about the winners over the years. Like, who won when, how often? Simple questions, really. I thought, maybe I could put together a little something, just for myself, to see the history laid out nicely.
Getting Hands Dirty
First step was grabbing the info. Finding a list of winners wasn’t hard. Just needed the year, the winning team, and maybe the runner-up. I copied that stuff into a basic spreadsheet. Nothing fancy, just columns and rows.
Then came the slightly annoying part. The data was a bit messy. Some names were spelled differently over the years, sometimes the source had extra notes I didn’t need. So, I spent a chunk of time just cleaning it up. Deleting junk, making sure team names were consistent. It’s boring work, but you gotta do it, right? Otherwise, whatever you build later is just gonna be wrong.
Once the data looked okay, I thought about what to do with it. A simple list felt kinda dull. I wanted something a tiny bit more visual, but I didn’t want to get bogged down in complicated tools. I decided to try making a really simple webpage. Just plain HTML, maybe a sprinkle of basic CSS to make it not look completely terrible.
- Got the winner list ready.
- Decided on a super simple web page.
- Started coding the basic structure.
Hitting a Few Snags
Now, I’m no web developer genius. Getting things to line up nicely took way longer than I thought it would. Stuff looked okay on my computer, then I’d check it on my phone and it would be all over the place. Frustrating! I spent quite a while fiddling with the layout, trying different simple styles. Lots of trial and error, mostly error at first.
I also thought about adding little flags for the countries, but finding simple flag images and making them look right next to the team names was another little headache. In the end, I kept it really basic – just the year, the winner, and the runner-up in clean rows.
What Came Out at The End
So, after messing around for a few evenings, I had this simple page. It’s literally just a list of Champions League finals, year by year. You can scroll through it, that’s about it. Nothing groundbreaking, definitely won’t win any awards!
But you know what? It felt good to finish it. I started with a simple idea, gathered the bits I needed, cleaned them up, put them together, and ended up with a thing that works. It does exactly what I wanted: shows me the winners easily. It was a good little exercise in just getting something done, from start to finish. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
