Okay, so I wanted to share how I put together this little ‘tarot virtual’ thing I was tinkering with. It wasn’t anything super fancy, mind you, just a small personal project I spent some time on.
Getting the Ball Rolling
It started simple enough. I just thought, wouldn’t it be neat to have a way to quickly pull a single tarot card digitally? Without digging out my actual deck all the time. Just something quick I could pull up on my computer when I felt like it.
First thing, I needed the cards themselves, or at least representations. I went looking for some simple card images online. Spent a bit of time searching until I found a basic set that looked okay and seemed free to use for personal stuff. Also grabbed a list of the standard card names. Didn’t worry too much about the deep meanings yet, just the basics: the name and the picture.
Figuring Out How to Make it Work
I decided to try making it work right in a web browser. Seemed the most straightforward path for me. So, I started by creating a basic HTML file. Just a blank page, really, to begin with. I knew I’d need a spot to display the card image once it was chosen, and maybe its name underneath. And definitely needed a button, something obvious like “Draw a Card”.
Then came the part that took more thinking – making it actually do something. I figured JavaScript was the tool for this job. My skills here are pretty basic, honestly. I definitely had to look up how to make something happen when a button gets clicked and, importantly, how to pick a random item from a list. Felt like I was patching things together.
- First, I typed out a list (an array, I guess it’s called?) right there in the script, containing all the card names I had.
- Then, I wrote a little chunk of code, a function, that was set up to run only when someone clicks that “Draw a Card” button.
- Inside that function, the main job was picking one card name completely randomly from the list I made earlier.
- The final step in the function was to update the image spot on the HTML page, telling it to show the picture file corresponding to the randomly chosen card, and also putting the card’s name on the page, usually right below the image.
Getting the image file paths exactly right was a bit fiddly. You know, making sure the name the script picked matched the actual filename of the picture. Had to double-check that stuff. I spent a good while just clicking the button over and over. Testing it. Sometimes it just wouldn’t show an image, or the name wouldn’t appear. Required a bit of poking around in the code, trying to spot the mistake. Little typos mostly.
Making it Look Less Ugly
Once I got it reliably drawing random cards, it looked really, really plain. Just stark black text and images on a blinding white background. So, the next step was to add a little bit of styling using CSS. I didn’t go wild with it. Just simple stuff: centered the main content on the page so it wasn’t stuck in the corner, maybe added a soft background color to make it easier on the eyes, and adjusted the spacing between the button, image, and text so it didn’t look all jammed together. Honestly, even those small changes made a big difference in how it felt to use.
Where I Left It
So yeah, that’s pretty much the story of how I got my simple ‘tarot virtual’ thing up and running. It just does the one thing: draws a single card when you click the button. It’s not doing complex readings or anything profound, just a small digital tool I managed to piece together. Maybe someday I’ll get around to adding the card meanings, or perhaps figuring out how to do a simple three-card spread. But for now, this basic version does what I initially wanted. It was actually a pretty satisfying little project, working through the steps and getting it functional.
