Hockey Libre Genève · Sylvain Tremblet

Context

10 rinks, 10 websites to check.

In Geneva, each rink publishes its open hockey schedule its own way: a web page, a PDF bulletin, a flyer. To know where to skate on a Saturday, you had to open ten websites, some of them still showing last season.

I play open hockey myself. I wanted a single page to check, and above all a calendar you never need to check again.

How it works

Sources
Web pages and PDF bulletins published by the rinks.
Scrapers
Written in Python, run every week by GitHub Actions.
Pull request
Changes arrive in a pull request.
Site and calendars
The Astro site and one .ics file per rink, plus a combined one.
Calendar app
Apple, Google or Outlook update on their own.

A subscription, not a page to revisit

The calendar is the main channel. You subscribe once, and added or cancelled sessions show up in your calendar on their own.

When a scraper fails, it keeps the last known state and emails me the error.

# vernets.ics
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Hockey libre - Vernets
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Zurich:20261004T110000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Zurich:20261004T120000
END:VEVENT

Choices

A cancellation stays visible
A session cancelled after it was published stays in the calendar, marked STATUS:CANCELLED. It never disappears silently.
Nothing uncertain shown as certain
If a source stops responding, the site keeps the last known data and flags it for review, rather than inventing or deleting anything.
No headless browser, no OCR
A deliberate choice: scrapers that are simple to maintain, and manual entry when a source doesn’t lend itself to scraping.

In pictures

Instagram

The account posts on its own: a story every day with a session, the opening and closing of each rink, and a summary of the next 7 days every Tuesday. The visuals are HTML templates rendered as images, then posted on schedule by a Cloudflare Worker. Instagram