At first, when I opened up the page for this project, I felt overwhelmed. I started wondering, “Am I sure I’m cut out to be a programmer? This is going to be a hard project.” After reading everything, I did some brainstorming by myself and with my husband to try to figure out what I wanted to do. This is an important part of the process because you should be scraping a website or websites with some kind of topic that you’re interested in and not something you think is boring. Though my husband knows a lot of things that I like and my hobbies, he doesn’t understand some of the programming aspects to be able to know if something would really work. I ended up picking my favorite hobby, knitting.
I looked over the example projects that were in the lesson and watched a walk-through video over and over before really getting started. As Avi did in the video, I took a few minutes to open up a notes file and just type out what the program should do and what I thought the user input and the output would look like. Then I did some searching on Google, chose the website Yarnspirations.com to do my scraping from, and got to work. It was challenging to find the right CSS classes or id’s to be able to get to exactly what was needed for each piece. It was definitely an organic process, doing one by one until they were all done. I ended up not including one of the items I wanted to because the html for the site did not have text or alternate text on the image, but it was not a crucial part. After finishing, I was encouraged by the fact that I had worked my way through the project and was able to do it.