Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I built a simple online tarot card reading tool, focusing on the Celtic Cross spread. It was a fun little project, and I learned a ton along the way.
First off, I started with the basics. I knew I needed a deck of tarot cards. Instead of using actual cards (which would be a pain to shuffle and deal online), I decided to go with digital images. I grabbed a set of tarot card images online – gotta make sure they’re royalty-free, of course! – and saved them as individual files.
Then came the HTML structure. I wanted a clean and simple layout. I used a div to hold the entire reading area, and within that, I created individual divs for each card position in the Celtic Cross spread. Think of it like this:
- Container Div (holds everything)
- Card Position 1 Div
- Card Position 2 Div
- …and so on, up to Card Position 10 Div
Next up: CSS! This was all about making things look decent. I styled the main container to be centered on the page with a nice background. Each card position div got a border, a bit of padding, and a specific placement to mimic the Celtic Cross layout. I used absolute positioning for this, which can be a bit tricky but gave me the control I needed to arrange the cards just so.
Now for the brains of the operation: JavaScript. This is where the magic (or, you know, the coding) happened. Here’s the breakdown:
- Load the Card Images: I wrote a function to load all the tarot card images into an array.
- Shuffle the Deck: A simple shuffling algorithm (like the Fisher-Yates shuffle) to randomize the order of the cards in the array. Important for a random reading!
- Deal the Cards: A loop that iterates through each card position div on the HTML page. For each position, it picks the next card from the shuffled deck array and assigns it as the background image of that div.
- Card Meanings: This was the trickiest part. I created a JavaScript object (or a series of if/else statements, depending on how fancy you want to get) that mapped each card image to its corresponding meaning for that specific position in the Celtic Cross. For example, the card in position one (The Present) would have one meaning, while the same card in position two (The Challenge) would have a different meaning.
- Display the Meanings: When a user clicks on a card, the script grabs the card’s image source, looks up its meaning in the JavaScript object, and displays that meaning in a designated area on the page. I used a simple alert box at first, but then I upgraded to a dedicated div for displaying the text.
One of the issues I ran into was dealing with reversed cards. In tarot, a card’s meaning can change depending on whether it’s upright or reversed. To handle this, I added a feature where each card has a 50% chance of being displayed upside down. I used CSS transforms (rotate(180deg)) to flip the card. Then, in the JavaScript object with the card meanings, I had separate entries for the upright and reversed versions of each card.
Another thing I wanted to add was some user interaction. I added a button that says “Get Reading”. When the button is clicked, the shuffle and deal functions are called, generating a new random spread.
Finally, to make it a little more polished, I added some basic error handling (like checking if all the images loaded correctly) and cleaned up the code to make it more readable.
So, that’s pretty much it! It’s a simple project, but it touches on a lot of fundamental web development concepts: HTML structure, CSS styling, JavaScript logic, image manipulation, and user interaction. Plus, it’s a fun way to play around with tarot cards online! The code is a bit messy, and I’m sure there are better ways to do some of the things I did, but hey, it works! And that’s all that matters, right?
If you’re thinking about building something similar, I highly recommend it. It’s a great learning experience, and you might even discover a new hobby along the way.
