Original: https://hilopalace.com/hpt_event_categories/movies/
Mobile-friendly: https://hilopalace.fly.dev/
My local artsy movie theater has a website ful of useful information. However, the Wordpress theme it's using doesn't look good on mobile browsers.
I often find myself out on Hilo Town, wanting to check what's at the Palace that night. And so I go to their website, and pinch and zoom and try to read the little text, and wonder if there's not a better way.
Ideally, the Palace website just needs a bit of an update, fluff the pillows, etc. But in the meantime...
Why not scrape the useful bits and reformat them?
I'd just need a few pieces...
- BeautifulSoup is a famously friendly web scraper.
- TailwindCSS could make a responsive site easy! or plain CSS3.
- If I'm using BeautifulSoup, I could stay in the Python ecosystem. Flask would be easy, but it had been a while since I'd used Django, so why not use that.
- Fly.io would let me run a little app server, since I'm not going the client-side JS route.
- Scrape and present the current movies page from the Palace theater's site. Just make it readable on a phone.
- Add back in links and other formatting
- Use the Wordpress API to extract info more directly https://hilopalace.com/wp-json/wp/v2/
- Cache data in a local db rather than fetching it each time (leveraging Django's strengths)
- Re-do the rest of the site, including non-movie events
As a fun comparision, I might try this project in Svelte, or in Elixir/Phoenix. We'll see!