For week 5’s ICM homework, I was so excited to be able to scrape data off Web pages that the page I chose to work with was the Rapture Index.

It’s always bugged me that the Rapture Index doesn’t have an RSS feed—it’s like the weather; we need to know it every day. Now, however, I can finally just roll my own feed.

The problem is that I can’t get my Rapture Scraper to show the correct description of the prophetic activity level (see under “why is this null?!?”). Just because the index has been stuck at “fasten your seatbelts” for as long as I’ve been watching it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know for sure. Like, what if the index suddenly climbs above the record high of 182? They’d have to make a new prophetic activity category, don’t you think?

So anyway, that’s the main thing I’d like to fix. I’m also unclear on why the text is so jagged. Smoothing is turned on in two places, and I’m using the font (Lucida Sans 20) only at the size at which it was bitmapped.

Another modification I’d like to make, oh, I dunno, when I have some of that “free time” I’m always hearing about, would be to maybe have the rapture balls bounce around at a speed that’s proportional to the index. The colors should probably also heat up. So when the world goes crazy, so will the application.