Playlists from The Site
November 25, 2018 8:09 AM   Subscribe

Playlists from The Site
There are quite frequently posts on AskMe or MetaFilter asking for song ideas or listing songs by artist or genre or etc.

I'm interested in writing a script or macro of some kind that would scrape the page, create a playlist and post it to Spotify or MeFi Music or???

I was first inspired by this 👇🏼thread and did a half-assed extraction and sorting of the links. (The link in the title is to that spreadsheet.)

21 Songs About or Featuring Drinking.
Role: developer API-lover collectorofALLthethings
posted by bendy (3 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

Do this one next! And anything similar. Pretty please :D
posted by aniola at 4:42 PM on November 26, 2018


TL;DR - I tried this and gave up. But yeah, doable in many different ways.

I started this once for YouTube / Vimeo links (not being hip enough for Spotify). I stopped when faced with numerous factors:

- Terms of Service legal stuff.

- API stuff (accounts, developer keys, etc.)

- Not wanting to 'claim' some sort of MetaFilter name on YouTube/etc.

- At the time, I think YouTube/Google did some sort of MetaFilter video playlist sort of thing already.

- The logistics of discovering or deciding which posts were worthy of treatment. Or you end up with a 'Playlist/#######' for every MF post that has a looked for link.

So I settled on a web-scraper script that just made me a list of YouTube/Vimeo links that I could edit down to the interesting ones so I could just download them locally and call it a day.

If I had the itch again, I'd set up something to watch the RSS feeds, and trigger on a comment by me that said something like "I'm saving these!". Then the code would catch up and keep watching that threads comments.

I know somewhere in MF past there were a few threads where I made comments about my code / half-solution but I'm too lazy to go looking ATM.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:48 AM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yeah, zengargoyle all I was talking about was aggregating not downloading stuff. Webscraper is the first step.
posted by bendy at 11:47 PM on December 12, 2018


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