It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since my last post on this project.
To recap, I setup automation that will pull what I’m currently listening to from Spotify. For the 1st version:
- Post the song I’m listening to, unless already posted for the day
- Post a weekly recap image based on my listening history of the week
- Post a quarterly recap image based on my listening history of the quarter
- Post when I add a song to my Liked Songs list
- Post when I add a song to my Walking playlist
- Post when I add a song to my Christmas playlist
This was working pretty well, but I felt it was being extremely chatty on Bluesky. I found that I wasn’t posting anything else and thought I should scale it back a little. So in June, I decided to rethink my strategy. I still wanted to capture what I was listening to, but didn’t feel like I needed to post every single thing. I also no longer wanted to generate weekly and quarterly posts. My listening habits didn’t really change week-to-week nor quarterly. So posting so frequently about the same things felt boring.
For the 2nd (current) version:
- Post an hourly recap based on what I listened to during the hour. This time, I capture repeats – that is, if I listen to a song multiple times, I count that… but I do require a 10-minute gap between counting the song.
- I post the total songs played and total minutes
- I post the top song (in case of repeats) of the hour
- I post the top artist of the hour
- If no repeats (song or artist) the last played song becomes the top song/artist for the hour
- Post a monthly recap
- Continue posting when I add a song to one of the 3 lists already mentioned
I’m pleased with the updated version as I do not feel like I’m spamming Bluesky as much. For the most part, this is working well. Although, I do think I’m having a little trouble with the logic that’s tracking repeated plays… but I’ll continue to tweak that. The monthly recaps are image based, and a color palette is defined for each month. This keeps things a little personalized. I’ve also spent a good bit of time improving my database viewer and making it more of a management dashboard. I’m tracking activities, and failures, better.
It’s been fun continuing to work on this project. I keep thinking of little tweaks to make and work on, and hope it continues to evolve. While it doesn’t do much of anything, it brings me a little joy.