Celebrity Death Watch

How Do I Add A Celeb?

To add your favorite celebrity, post a comment.

 

How Did This Come About?

Right after Hulk Hogan died, this started as a curiosity, to have a command which checks wikipedia to see whether a given celebrity is currently deceased.

The original command outputs ‘1’ if the celebrity is deceased, or ‘0’ if not.

I became completely obsessed with this idea, and spent way too much time on it.

This mutated in to a full-fledged script that parses the input and formats the output based on the search result.

This mutated in to a second script which does the following:

  • Parses a text file containing a list of celebrities
  • For each celebrity, it determines IF a wikepedia page exists
  • IF the page exists, it checks to see if the celeb is alive or dead
  • Then builds a HTML table based on the result

In a final burst of obsession, I converted the entire thing to CSS-based styles using a static stylesheet.

Now, I have this page uploaded to my hosting provider and running every day at 5 AM central time.

Obsession is a weird thing.

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