capsule/markdown/adding-musicthread-to-my-now-page.md

title	published	updated
Adding MusicThread to My /now Page	2024-05-01T20:28:09.000000Z	2024-05-01T20:28:09.000000Z

It's been a few months since I shared how I had integrated (near) realtime weather station data into my omg.lol profile page. I've since done a little bit more work to start managing that (and the related /now page) with GitOps. Not only has that allowed me to update my pages from my terminal, but it's also made it easier (and safer) for me to tinker with the presentation.

So today I knocked out something I'd been intended to do for ages: I set up my /now page to pull the latest album or track from my "Now Playing" thread on MusicThread. I opted for this approach rather than direct last.fm (or other scrobbler) integration for two important reasons:

1. It was easier, and
2. I want there to still be some degree of personal curation occurring.

I want it to answer the question, "Hey, what are you listening to lately?" rather than just blindly reporting whatever happens to be queued up. As a visitor to someone's page, I'm less interested in what song is currently playing than I am in what music has caught their ear recently. So that's what I wanted to present on my page.

All that is to say, this integration was pretty straight forward and I didn't even need to mess with any messy authentication. MusicThread has a very simple API, so I quickly determine that all I needed to do was make a GET request against:

https://musicthread.app/api/v0/thread/2aVjZUocjk96LELFbV5JvJjm14v

And it would return the thread in JSON:

{
    "links": [
        {
            "artist": "Stone Sour",
            "description": "",
            "key": "2fnI6uEVJdT5kPyRho6XQhebmVO",
            "page_url": "https://musicthread.app/link/2fnI6uEVJdT5kPyRho6XQhebmVO",
            "submitted_at": "2024-04-29T22:37:22.740999Z",
            "thumbnail_url": "https://img.musicthread.app/37d8a80b52457eba701fedba13a39f4687c290da/68747470733a2f2f692e7363646e2e636f2f696d6167652f61623637363136643030303062323733623432346165623531303031366461613162633032353163",
            "title": "Through Glass",
            "type": "track"
        },
        {
            "artist": "Logic, Eminem",
            "description": "",
            "key": "2fWfoHJysUL8LlwyiIZoo6Vjmck",
            "page_url": "https://musicthread.app/link/2fWfoHJysUL8LlwyiIZoo6Vjmck",
            "submitted_at": "2024-04-24T01:25:27.31569Z",
            "thumbnail_url": "https://img.musicthread.app/ff084172da28a68d863de47e1e1481ba6a201fae/68747470733a2f2f692e7363646e2e636f2f696d6167652f61623637363136643030303062323733343163306164336533393338386162333332666662303233",
            "title": "Homicide (feat. Eminem)",
            "type": "track"
        }
    ]
}

I'm only interested in the newest (0th) entry, and I only need the title, artist, and page_url. So here's the JS I hastily threw together to throw into the head element of my web/now page:

// retrieves latest link from a musicthread thread and displays it on the page
const musicthread = 'https://musicthread.app/api/v0/thread/2aVjZUocjk96LELFbV5JvJjm14v';
fetch(musicthread)
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then(function(res){
    let nowPlaying = res.links[0];
    document.getElementById('now-playing').innerHTML = "" + nowPlaying.title + " by " + nowPlaying.artist;
  });

And then I can just replace the list-item where I'd been manually inputting the music info (like a cave person) with something like this:

- Silence {headphones}

So that's now live on now.jbowdre.lol, and the source for the whole shebang is in my GitHub. I even have a quick musicthread.htmlpage I made for testing in case you want a quick peak at just this piece.

=> https://blog.jbowdre.lol/post/2024-05-01 📡 Originally posted on jbowdre's weblog