I’m a retired Unix sysadmin. Over the years I’ve built things in COBOL, FORTAN, C, perl, rexx, PHP, visual basic, various Unix shells and maybe others. Nothing has been a real “application” - mostly just utilities to help me get things done.

Now that I’m retired, and it’s cold outside, I’m curious to try some more coding - and I have an idea.

The music communities here seem to post links to YouTube. I generally use Lemmy on my phone but don’t use YouTube, or listen to music, on my phone if I can help it. I’d like to scrape a music community here and add the songs posted to a playlist in my musicbrainz account.

Does that sound like a reasonable learner project? Any suggestions for language and libraries appreciated. My preferred IDE is vim on bash and I have a home server running Linux where this could run as a daemon, or be scheduled.

  • @ericjmorey
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    6 months ago

    I’m going to assume you’re going to go ahead with the idea. You could make use of the fact that every lemmy based community has an RSS feed.

    • Great Blue HeronOP
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      46 months ago

      Yes, I’m working on it now. Struggling with basic stuff like pulling values out of the json returned by the API when I ask for a list of posts. Python really does not click for me, but I’m determined, for now, to keep at it. An the RSS feed seems like a much easier (than what…?) way to just get new posts with each run - thank you!

      • @ericjmorey
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        66 months ago

        I don’t like Python either. But I use it because it’s widely used because many others find it easy to learn and work with (I guess people like us think a bit differently). Maybe you should forge ahead with PHP (it’s having a mini resurgence in popularity).

        If you’re sticking with Python, make sure you use the built in json module. If you need a plain English tutorial, this tutorial on the json module is solid. If you want some real time help you can always chat in the Python Matrix Room (#python:matrix.org).