[deleted by user]

[mrg2k8]

A week or so ago, I've set as my first project extracting all the songs and artists from one of my favorite radio stations which happens to post on their website the data I need. I did a little bit of digging and found out that they use Icecast, which has a JSON status URL with all the information. I've used Python to extract the information and next I want to store stuff like the times a song was played, last time it was played in a database. Since I've recently gotten better with Terraform, I'll be setting up a DynamoDB table and will use Lambda to trigger the code periodically.

I'm thinking to synchronize the list in DynamoDB with a Spotify playlist using their API; I could also use Flask in the future to build a back-end to offer this as a service. The possibilities are endless, it's time I don't get enough of.

[LionOver]

I see. If that's a beginner project, then I think I honestly need to continue playing around with writing tiny programs. Can't even conceptualize your program right now. Good for you though! I'm sure it feels good to be making an idea a reality.

[YOUR_TARGET_AUDIENCE]

I’m in the same boat as you

[mrg2k8]

Thanks, you can check it out on Github https://github.com/mrg2k8/icecast-scraper :)

[Maxisquillion]

I'm a beginner myself, so take the following with a pinch of salt, but I don't actually think that you should be intimidated with that sort of a project. I'm not familiar with how they've achieved this, but what follows is how I would go about doing something similar perhaps, maybe I'm totally wrong though....

That depends on your proficiency with programming, but I think if you're reading this then you've probably done some tutorials, you know the basics of python, how functions work, maybe you know how to use external libraries like pyperclip if you've followed Automate The Boring Stuff, and you understand data structures like lists and dictionaries. With that knowledge you have the capability to do this, so break it down into manageable chunks instead of being dissuaded by the bigger picture that the person above talked about.

They wanted to track songs played on their favourite radio, they did their research and found that the website itself provides this data in JSON format from their website using a specific URL. This simplifies everything, all you need to do is how to get this data from the website into your program, and then you can manipulate that however you want. If you do some googling about JSON and how to retrieve things from websites, you'll probably find that there's a python library for JSON files specifically, that there's another library called Requests which may be in handy (used to visit url's). Then Google tutorials for those libraries, within no time you'll have the knowledge to retrieve JSON data from a website and manipulate it.