Okay, so, I messed around with trying to figure out how to get a decent TV guide for Sky F1, because, honestly, their app is kinda trash.
First things first: I started by just googling “Sky F1 schedule” – real original, I know. But hey, gotta start somewhere, right?
Then I quickly realized official sources were either super basic or trying to get me to sign up for a million things. No thanks.
So, next up: I tried hunting for some kind of third-party aggregator site. Scoured a bunch of forums, Reddit, all that jazz. Found a few that were kinda okay, but nothing that really nailed it. Most were either outdated or just plain ugly.
Here’s where I got a little more hands-on: I figured, “Why not try to build something myself?” I know, I know, sounds like a pain, but I was bored.
- Step 1: Looked for an API. Ideally, something free that gave me the schedule data. Spoiler alert: didn’t find anything perfect.
- Step 2: Started thinking about web scraping. Ugh. But hey, desperate times, right? I picked a few sites that seemed to have the info I needed and started inspecting their HTML.
- Step 3: I fired up Python and Beautiful Soup. Got to work trying to extract the data I wanted. It was a bit of a pain, honestly. The HTML structures were all over the place.
Biggest hurdle: The websites kept changing their layouts! Seriously, I’d get my script working perfectly, and then BAM, the next day the HTML was different, and I’d have to rewrite everything. Super annoying.
Ended up with: A janky Python script that scrapes a couple of different websites, pulls the Sky F1 schedule, and outputs it into a basic text file. It’s not pretty, but it works. I have to run it manually, and it breaks every other week, but hey, it’s something.
Future plans (maybe): I’d love to turn this into a proper web app with a nice UI. Maybe even try to train a model to predict schedule changes so I don’t have to keep rewriting my scraper. But for now, this messy little script is doing the trick. At least until the websites change again.
Final thought: It’s a pain in the butt to get a decent Sky F1 TV guide. Someone should really fix that.
