How do I trick my brain into completing a project? I’m making an app that shows which voice actor plays a character in the movie and what other movies they act in. It’s useful for me personally but I feel like I’m making something that’s been done numerous times over and I lost the momentum because I’m on vacation with my family now. I ran into some problems with the project too and getting help takes a ton of time so it’s disrupting the rythm too. I really have to put at least 2-3 projects like this for a portfolio;_;
Reduce scope. Look at what you’re doing and cut out all the “nice to haves” until you have just the “need to haves”.
For a behindthevoiceactors clone, the bare minimum would be a simple web page with a search bar for actor names. You could use a query string in the URL that gets passed to an IMDb API call that then renders a simple page that just has the actor’s name as the header and a plain table listing shows/movies/games and their role(s) and years.
Everything on top of that, pretty CSS, pictures, hyperlinks to other places, that’s all fluff that you can add on after you’re already “done” having created a minimum viable product. And at the nice to have stage, you can put it down at any point without feeling like it’s unfinished.
I’m using a similar API, I think IMDb wasn’t publicly available or something like this? I don’t remember exactly. I need Polish actors if that makes any difference.
Good idea with focusing on the main features. I wanted to try this at first but with web appinstead of the usual console app was a little awkward but I’ll look into this again.
Currently the number 1 issue is extracting actor names. They don’t come in json like an array or something, they’re only available via parsing a page so a string with html markup and stuff. There was some confusion because when I asked about that, I might’ve described it wrong because people on the server thought I’m doing web scraping? I’m not sure if it counts as scraping if it’s from an api though. I’ll have to clear it up probably but that last misunderstanding was really stressful.
Interesting. An API call shouldn’t return HTML, since it’s essentially just a proxy to query a DB for some value, so I can see why they’d think you’re web scraping. Might want to try a different API?
But yeah, most APIs have a fee associated with them, so web scraping gets around that. You could fully commit to it, nothing wrong with that. If you’re web scraping though, I’d definitely do some studying up on how the DOM works. Once you learn to navigate it, things get a lot easier. https://www.w3schools.com/whatis/whatis_htmldom.asp
Good luck!!
I’ll see if there are any other APIs, maybe I missed some. I specifically need the Polish ones so it’s a bit tricky